“This isn’t an inspection, Spock. I just wanted to check the place out.”
Spock seemed to understand the distinction. “I have visited all our expedition sites on planet. Susquatane is ideal.”
“There’s usually a ‘but’ somewhere.” Pike didn’t believe in Edens naturally occurring in hellish places. But if there was something wrong with Susquatane, he hadn’t heard of it. This location was cool and sterile, but others were warm and teeming with life.
“Perhaps I should say that finding a Class-M planet here was improbable.” Spock gestured to the sky. “But not impossible.”
The Pergamum Nebula was an active body, with many regions of matter and energy in motion. Most had emissions hostile to living beings. But the Susquatane system sat in a bubble safely apart from the greatest dangers. “We’re in the eye of the hurricane,” Pike said, looking up.
“There are parts of the comparison which are not apt, Captain. Susquatane is not affixed to this location, such that it would be overtopped by the storm as time elapsed. Rather, it is traveling in space with the protected pocket. To know the permanence of the situation, it is imperative to study the atmosphere and geology of the world and the condition of its life-forms, both now and in the past.”
“Spock, you sold me months ago. We’re here.” Pike looked about. “You think your surveys will soak up the remaining weeks of the mission?”
“Without difficulty.” Spock eyed him. “You are willing to remain?”
Pike was surprised by the question. “Yeah, of course. We were ordered to stay in the nebula.”
“I ask because travel is the function of starship captains—and for many, their preferred state.”
“Not this one.” Pike gestured with his gloved hands. “For centuries on my world, captains have had to learn to live with time in port. This place seems reasonably safe—and as interesting as you say. I could kick around here for a while.”
“Excellent.”
“But it’d be nice to have a horse,” Pike said with a smirk. “I don’t suppose you’ve found any?”
“There are land-traversing cephalopods in the temperate zone which are sized similarly with ungulates on Earth,” Spock said.
“Then I need a saddle.”
“They would interpret any attempt to approach them as a challenge.”
“I’ve broken a bronco or two.”
“The challenge would not take physical form. The cephalopod would sing to you, and expect you to harmonize. If you fail to satisfy, it would immobilize you with a harmless ink spray while its companions educated you.”
“Maybe I can do without that.”
Pike heard the others approach before he saw them. It was the sound of the R3, one of the small surface vehicles Enterprise kept in its stores for expedition sites. Generically known as a snow scouter, it resembled a three-person version of one of the open-air Earth snowmobiles of old. With sleds at its base and antigrav-assisted repulsors for occasional use, the device cut a clean path across the slope, barely disturbing it. Pike’s footsteps were leaving more of an imprint.
The driver disembarked first. Ghalka, a silver-haired Andorian biologist, looked as if she felt right at home. “Welcome, Captain,” the chipper ensign said. “We’ve established a post above a subglacial lake. Would you care to see it?”
“Maybe later.” Pike smiled at the second occupant. “Wheedled your way down, did you, Connolly?”
Connolly stepped off the snow scouter and smiled. “I said I’d be useful.”
You and a lot of other people, Pike thought. A fair chunk of his staff was on the ground. This team’s safety was coordinated by the third rider. Nhan was still seated in the vehicle, cinching her uniform and examining her phaser. The replacement for longtime Security Chief Mohandas had insisted on taking some of the shifts personally, perhaps not bargaining for the weather. “Ready for the next safari,” the Barzan said, moisture crystallizing in the air in the space before her breathing device. “They should put a roof on this thing.”
Spock conferred briefly with his colleagues and then approached the vehicle. “Commander, I must go back to the lake. There is an instrumentation problem.”
Nhan shivered. “Glad I didn’t bother to get off.”
“You must. There are only three seats and I will need both my colleagues with me.”
“That’s not the arrangement, Mister Spock. The camps are under shipboard surveillance, but nobody leaves without a security officer.”
“I can vouch for their safety.”
Nhan stood and looked to Pike. “Captain?”
Pike’s eyes widened. Wow, a command decision. “This is the deadest place on the planet, right?”
“Until you get a kilometer down,” Connolly said.
Pike nodded. “It’s been a week with no incident. And we don’t want to beam when it’s short distances.” Even in this relatively safe spot of the Pergamum, Enterprise’s crew had decided not to overuse the transporter until they knew more about interactions with the particle environment. “Your call, Nhan.”
She looked at the scientists. “Who doesn’t have a sidearm?”
Ghalka looked puzzled. “I don’t, but—”
“You do now.” Nhan stepped off the snow scouter and placed her phaser in the ensign’s hand. “I want that back.”
Ghalka stared at it. “It’s your only one?”
“It’s not even the only one on me,” the security chief said. Her devotion to her personal weaponry was well known. “Report back to Enterprise every fifteen minutes.”
Well done, Pike thought as the snow scouter powered up again. Nhan was new, but his crew was in good hands.
Boots crunching snow, she began to walk around the camp with him. “I was going to see you after my shift down here,” she said, “to report on the torpedo detonation.”
“This is as good a place as any.”
“It’s as cold a place as any. I’m freezing my ass off—Captain.”
“Sorry.” He’d always known her to speak her mind. “We can always go back up before we talk.”
“Are you kidding? After all those months I thought the walls were closing in.”
Pike well understood. “The torpedo. What are our theories again?”
Nhan began numbering with her fingers. “One: that Good News—I mean, Galadjian—is wrong about it being a torpedo.”
“The five percent possibility. A natural phenomenon.”
“Two: that it was a mine that somebody left.” Nhan waved randomly to the sky. “A mine in defense of what, I have no idea.”
“I hate mines,” Pike said. Every spacefarer did, with a passion.
“Three—and I used to like this—that the weapon had gone off track from some previous war, seeking a target until it had found the Pergamum—and Enterprise.”
“You don’t like that one anymore?”
Nhan pointed to the horizon, and the receding snow vehicle. “Spock did the math for me on how infinitesimal such an accidental meeting would be. I believe him.”
“I can believe he said ‘infinitesimal.’ ” Pike began to wish he’d brought the parka after all. “What about hostile actors firing with intent?”
“That’s always been the zero option—as Spock would say, the null hypothesis—to be disproven.” Nhan shrugged. “But we’ve found absolutely no supporting evidence for it in eight months here. There’s more life under our feet than in those clouds.”
“At least in the parts that we’ve seen.” Pike kicked at the snow. “Conclusion?”
“I’ll keep looking. Hell, we’re not going anywhere for a while.” She gritted her teeth. “How long are we here?”
“The rest of the tour. The full four months.”
“Ouch.” Nhan shivered again and looked around. “I think I’ll let my staffers handle the detail at this site. Enough of them want down here, they can have it.”
Pike clenched his teeth and nodded. “Yeah, the night air’s starting to get a little
brisk. Let’s both go up. I think Spock can take care of himself until your relief arrives.”
“No argument here.”
Pike flipped open his communicator. He was already thinking about a change of clothes—and a trip to one of the warmer zones. Whichever one doesn’t have the singing cephalopod.
11
* * *
Combat Module Carrier 539-Aloga
Approaching Susquatane
The Lurians were right, Kormagan thought. There it is.
The wavemaster couldn’t believe her luck. Dozens of duty cycles had elapsed since CMC539-A—more simply known around the unit as Carrier Aloga—had captured Baladon and his crewmates. In that time, her people had come to think of Enterprise as unreal. An imaginary ship, inserted into the database on Deathstrike for no good reason other than to prank anyone who came along to steal their vessel. Kormagan couldn’t buy that. She’d spent enough time with the Lurians to conclude that none of them had the requisite imagination.
But Baladon, the only one with any intellect, had been considerably more pliable in the weeks since his capture—and had provided her with the location where he’d first spotted Enterprise. His ship’s records called the world Susquatane. Kormagan’s people were aware of the planet, naturally. They knew every drifting pebble, every flamed-out cinder of a star, in the nebula. Susquatane was too far from the places they cared about to be of interest, though, and so they’d never even named the place. That wasn’t unusual. Their nebula didn’t have a name, either. It was nothing to get sentimental about.
Kormagan had thought Baladon’s intended quarry was worth playing a hunch, and between missions had launched probes into the debris clouds surrounding the Susquatane system. Sure enough, the robotic scouts later reported that Enterprise had returned to the planet, prompting her to retreat hastily from another engagement. Soon, her five carriers had joined the probes in the clouds, straining for a look at the mystery vessel.
For what seemed like the hundredth time that day, she cast her eyes upon it—or rather, on the latest imagery, projected in front of her by the graphical interface in the armored cupola that served to protect her leathery head. The pictures had come from her stealth probes, still at work; they’d gotten in a lot closer in recent days. Enterprise hadn’t visibly responded to them, suggesting that its sensors weren’t something her people hadn’t encountered before.
The rest of the ship, though, was something else. Since her flotilla’s arrival in the cloud, she had studied Enterprise whenever she had the chance. During meals, exercise—
—and briefings.
“Wavemaster! Are you listening?” asked someone unseen.
“Affirm.” With regret, Kormagan toggled the Enterprise image to disappear, revealing her aide-de-camp. His name appeared in soft green lettering superimposed over his armored form, which was in all other ways identical to hers. “Sorry, Oppy. Where were we?”
“I know where you were,” Opmaster Sperrin replied with a laugh. “We haven’t gotten to Enterprise yet.”
“Then go faster.” Kormagan looked down at the armorer toiling at her feet. “You, too, Jayko.”
The chief armorer stopped tinkering with her shin plating long enough to swear. Then it was back to work. Other wavemasters took their briefings in more formal surroundings, but Kormagan never had time for that—certainly not when there was impending action. So she stood in Jayko’s bustling workshop, getting a replacement knee joint fitted as Sperrin droned on about the details of the day.
“You should let us supply you with a whole new outfit,” Jayko grumbled.
“Never,” Kormagan replied. “This armor’s kept me alive—”
“—for sixty trillion years!” he retorted. Nobody in the wave quite knew what the real number was. “I’m tired of patching you up.” Jayko looked up at her. “And this would be easier if you removed the assembly.”
Kormagan stared down. “Am I on duty?”
“I guess.”
“Are you on duty?”
“What does it look like?”
“I can’t tell. You’re working so slowly, my movement detector timed out.”
“I’m not surprised,” Jayko grumbled under his breath. “It was probably built by my grandfather.”
Kormagan crossed her arms. Her preference to remain suited up most of the time wasn’t unusual in the service; there were plenty of members of species aboard Carrier Aloga who needed the environmental protections for reasons beyond the radiation areas the vessel often had to traverse. But Kormagan’s insistence that all those in her wave remain armored while on duty was unusual.
Outsiders called it eccentric; she called it sensible. It underscored that they were all one unit, regardless of species. But there was a more important reason. The nebula was the most dangerous place in creation. You never knew when you might have to go into action.
“I almost forgot,” Sperrin said. “The packet drone came in from Five-Four-Four just before we reentered the cloud.”
The Forty-Fours. What a joke. Kormagan looked at her aide. “What’s old Hemmick want now?”
“He took your deal. The forty Lurians we sent in exchange for some of those new combiner gate valves they came up with for disruptor cannons.”
“How many valves did he send?”
“Ten.”
“He paid too much.” Baladon had sworn about his forces’ incompetence during his first meeting with Kormagan; as it turned out, he was being too generous by half. Kormagan relaxed. “I think that was the last of the bad ones. Hemmick must be desperate for reinforcements. Maybe he can do something with them.”
“K’davu save us from the Lurians!” Jayko looked up, disgust doubtlessly hiding behind the opaque ports of his headgear. “They keep fouling up their circulation units. Every time they pass gas, the warning systems think there’s an armor breach during a chemical attack.”
“Were we talking to you?” Kormagan asked.
The armorer answered by taking a laser torch to her kneecap covering, still gnarled since her last engagement had turned part of it to scrap.
“Skip to it, Oppy. What’s on the ground?”
“Readings from the probes’ passes are in,” Sperrin said. “Enterprise has occupiers on Susquatane.”
“How many?”
“Approximately thirty. Six camps, all on the same side of the planet. It’s mostly land there. Observe.”
Kormagan watched as inside her headgear a map of Susquatane appeared, along with glowing markers where non-native life signs had been detected. “Looks like it’s mostly humans.”
“We’ve seen them before,” Sperrin said. “I’ve never met one.”
“I have. They’re more useful than Lurians.” But toggling to see the surveillance shots, Kormagan noticed something was missing. “How did they get down there? In those shuttles we thought Enterprise had?”
“Unknown. We don’t see any down there now.”
Kormagan switched to the close-up images. “They just plop their forces down there with no way back. What kind of invasion force is that?”
“Maybe it isn’t one,” Sperrin said. “They could be prospecting.”
“With a ship that size? Negative.” A plan forming, Kormagan dismissed the imagery from her sight. “This’ll be easier than I thought. A basic snatch-grab.”
Her aide was startled. “You’re bypassing Enterprise?”
“For now. We don’t know its capabilities. So we harry, take her measure—keep her from launching those shuttles.” It could work, she thought. And thirty people below was a good number. A classic ground operation, like her very first mission decades before.
She turned, her sudden movement nearly taking the still-laboring armorer with her. “Wait,” Jayko cried, chisel in hand. “I’m not done.”
“I’ll fix it myself.” Kormagan looked at Sperrin. “I want all the carrier chiefs on the low-band in ten. Get the probe runners in on it. And find Baladon. If there’s anything he hasn’t revealed abou
t this ‘Starfleet,’ I want to know it.”
“Affirm.”
“We’re doing this today. Enterprise is about to meet the Boundless.”
12
* * *
Susquatane
Polar Expedition Site
“. . . really, sir, it’s all math. And geometry and physics—and gravity, of course.” Connolly smiled at Spock. “That’s part of what drew me into this line of work—imagining how the game would have transpired on other planets. Space travel completely transforms everything we know about sabermetrics.”
“Lieutenant, I am gratified that your interest in an ancient human sport brought you to science,” Spock said as he knelt over the data collector. “But I repeat that I have been sufficiently informed about baseball.”
“Sorry,” Connolly said, his breath shimmering in the night. “Here’s the pliers.”
Spock took them. He could not regret including his relief in the expedition, for the most interesting information about life on Susquatane was bound to come from deep under the ice shelf, in places Connolly could locate. Whether fossilized or somehow alive, any beings there would explain much about how stable the planet’s ecology had been over time. Susquatane was a fair-weather island in a perpetual storm; future settlers would want to know how long that weather might last.
Still, Spock had calculated that by working with Connolly’s team instead of the other ones on Susquatane, he would be able to get the lieutenant back onto Enterprise as soon as possible. That would spare the ship any more time without a senior science officer on the bridge—and would have the added benefit of removing Connolly and his speculations about “what must be happening in the winter meetings back home,” whatever they were.
Ghalka brought another tool kit from the stowage on the snow scouter. “How’s our baby doing?”
“The geocorder, which you persist in likening to a living being, is still not calibrated to within acceptable limits,” Spock said. “The magnesite deposits below interfere with its sensors.”
The Enterprise War Page 6