Tenger scrutinized the readings on the tactical console for anything that might provide insight, but that the sensor-analysis programs might not flag. A few minutes before, he had noted an unusual concentration of silver-oxide molecules, which he’d then tracked back to a damaged satellite. He scanned the compromised device to find that a micrometeoroid had torn through its casing and embedded itself in a battery pack, which proved to be the source of the leaked particles. Other than that, he’d seen nothing that warranted further attention.
The security chief had arrived an hour early for his shift, displacing Ensign Molina to a secondary bridge station. Tenger typically prided himself on his punctuality, appearing at meetings and for duty at exactly the prescribed times. He had been that way for more than a quarter century, ever since his training at the Academy, when he’d replaced his continual attempts to challenge boundaries with a commitment to formality and discipline.
At the time he’d chosen to apply for entry into Starfleet, he had not yet admitted to himself—and perhaps had not even realized—the role that his sister’s fate had played in his decision. Revna had not been a beauty, a rarity among Orion women, but their family had at first counted that fact as a boon. On Lokras IV, where they lived, pirates threatened the colony world on a regular basis, not least of all by seizing beautiful young women they could sell on the interstellar black market.
The Orion Syndicate had also maintained a heavy presence in and around the Lokras region. Their smugglers routinely ran native plants from the planet and peddled them to the manufacturers of illicit drugs, while at the same time trafficking those drugs back to the colony. Their particular brand of avarice instigated a public health crisis on Lokras IV, in turn fomenting terrible social ills. Tenger’s parents protected their daughter and son as best they could, even taking the precaution of having tracer chips embedded in their children’s sides—chips that would sound an alarm if they moved outside designated safe areas, such as home and school and the routes between.
Tenger, eight years his sister’s junior, had still been attending primary school when she’d matriculated at university. Never a tremendously cheerful sort, Revna soon developed a moroseness that everybody in the family attributed to a lack of self-confidence, owing to her short height and broad, almost masculine frame. But nobody—not even Tenger—understood the depth of her pain, and when she didn’t return home one evening, it became too late for such understanding to matter.
A police investigation had found Revna’s tracking chip at school, which she’d evidently dug out of her own flesh, carrying it with her to places that wouldn’t trigger an alert signal, and hiding it in those places when she went elsewhere. She remained missing for five days with no hint at all about where she might have gone or what might have happened to her. Tenger didn’t know if his sister had simply run away from home, but something other than a possible threat to her well-being troubled him even more: he hated not knowing.
When the police had at last collected evidence that Revna might have voluntarily or involuntarily left Lokras IV, the failure of everyone in the family to recognize the seriousness of her despair became clear in the shock they all displayed when they learned where she had last been seen: outside the local spaceport, in an alley not far from the freight terminal, in a seedy, disreputable part of town. They learned that she had often visited that alley, and others, in search of an illegal commodity: the Venus drug. According to one of her friends, Revna wanted to change her appearance, to soften her features and round her curves, and she consumed the banned substance daily for months. Long rumored to be a fiction, the Venus drug—or whatever Tenger’s sister used—didn’t produce the results she so desperately sought.
Maybe that had driven Revna over the edge, or maybe, as Tenger had suspected, some nefarious thug had taken advantage of her hopelessness. However it happened, she stopped taking the Venus drug and instead tried another prohibited substance: blood-gem. The powerful and devastatingly addictive narcotic made her so chemically and psychologically dependent on it that she sold herself into offworld servitude in exchange for a constant supply.
The Lokras IV police had followed Revna’s trail to the Erivek system, on the Federation-Klingon border, and from there into the heart of the Empire. On Celos II, weeks of investigation passed without success. Finally, retracting his demand of local officials for an official inquiry into who had brought Tenger’s sister there, and waiving any claims that a crime had been committed by a Klingon national or that an interstellar treaty had been violated, the Orion detective settled for discovering Revna’s whereabouts. He found her in the morgue, dead from an overdose at the age of twenty.
Tenger had felt as though his world had been torn apart. Too late, his family fled Lokras IV and relocated to the Orion homeworld, where they stayed with Tenger’s paternal aunt. Whatever small amount of independence he’d previously enjoyed evaporated. As protective as his parents had been on Lokras IV, they redoubled their efforts to keep their son safe.
Tenger had rebelled. At every opportunity, he fought to escape the constant attention paid to him by the adults in his family—father, mother, aunt, uncle, and an older female cousin. He ignored the restrictions his parents placed on him. He acted out not only as a direct result of the trauma of losing his sister, but also because he knew that, at least in part, he blamed his father and mother for Revna’s death. Worse, he blamed himself. He’d only been a boy, but he still believed that he should have grasped the downward spiral of emotion in which his sister had been caught. He didn’t know what he could have done—maybe nothing more than telling his parents, but maybe that would have been enough to save Revna.
When a Starfleet officer had visited his secondary school as part of the Federation’s cultural outreach, though, Tenger had perceived a means of saving himself. Nonplused by his choice, his family nevertheless did not stand in his way, although they worried that he would defy the structure of the Academy. Instead of railing against the rules, though, he clung to them. In retrospect, it didn’t require psychological training to pinpoint his motivation: he did what his sister could not, living within an exacting set of regulations. More than that, he learned to enforce those regulations—on others, but also on himself. In that way, he felt that he honored Revna’s memory.
Occasionally, though, Tenger’s punctiliousness gave way to his other dominant personality trait, as it had done that morning aboard Enterprise. The security chief appreciated all the reasons the captain had given for continuing to investigate what had happened on Rejarris II, from the simple desire to solve a mystery, to the search for scientific and historical knowledge, to the Federation’s need to know whether the Tzenkethi had been involved in the disappearance of the planet’s inhabitants. In particular, if the Coalition had played a role, it would serve the UFP well to find out whether they had rescued the population or exterminated them. But for Tenger himself, it had been more of a visceral feeling that had driven him to the bridge well before the beginning of his shift: he hated not knowing.
As the security chief studied the sensor readings, a door whispered open. He glanced up from his tactical console to see Captain Sulu and Commander Linojj exiting the portside turbolift. He checked the chronometer on his panel and saw that they had arrived just before the beginning of alpha shift.
“Good morning, Commander,” Sulu said, returning his gaze as she approached the command chair. “You’ve gotten a head start on the day.”
“Yes, sir,” Tenger said.
“Too many questions, not enough answers?”
“Something like that, Captain, yes.” Tenger had begun serving with Demora Sulu eleven years earlier, when he’d transferred from U.S.S. Comet to become Enterprise’s new chief of security. She knew him well.
As Linojj took her position on the starboard side of the bridge, Sulu addressed Ensign S’Teles, who had taken the conn through gamma shift. He’d risen from the command chair as soon as the captain had entered the bridge. “Good morning, Ensign,” Sulu said. “Anything to report, other then the security chief’s uncharacteristically early arrival?”
“Other than that, Captain,” the Caitian said with a lilt that signaled his amusement, “the Enterprise has continued on its orbital search pattern through the night.” Tenger heard the soft vibrational sound that often underscored the felinoid’s words. “We have so far completed forty-seven percent of our scans. To this point, we have detected no signs whatsoever that any ship with an active warp drive, other than the Enterprise itself, has ever visited Rejarris Two.”
“Thank you, Ensign,” Sulu said. “You’re dismissed.”
“Yes, sir,” S’Teles said. “Thank you, sir.”
Over the following few minutes, the rest of the alpha-shift bridge crew arrived to relieve their gamma-shift counterparts. Tenger sent the overnight tactical officer, Cristobal Molina, off-duty, then returned to inspecting the sensor readings as they marched across his display. An hour later, his screen flashed yellow an instant before he registered what the numbers and symbols on his console told him.
“Captain, sensors are picking up what looks like a neutrino trail embedded in subspace,” he said. “It could be a residual artifact of a warp signature.”
“Where?” Sulu asked.
“In high orbit . . . it’s exceedingly faint.” He activated a calibration tool on his panel and worked to fine-tune the sensors. “It’s difficult to localize.”
“I see it too,” said Fenn at the sciences station. “My instruments highlighted the reading, but they can’t confirm that it’s the result of a warp engine.”
“If it is,” Tenger said, “it could be years old, maybe even decades.”
“If the people of Rejarris Two did evacuate their planet,” Linojj said from her station, “it could have taken place decades ago. Maybe a warp-capable species did help them.”
As the first officer spoke, Tenger saw the sensors highlight something else as unusual and requiring analysis. “Captain, I’m reading a fog of other particles in high orbit, in normal space, in roughly the same location as the potential warp signature.”
“I see it as well,” Fenn said.
“There’s a mix of metallic elements,” Tenger said. “Many atoms have been ionized. That could signify the remnants of an explosion.”
“Sensors also show a confusing jumble of rocket propellants and vestiges of antimatter,” Fenn said. “They could be the residue of spent fuel.”
“Is there a satellite in or near that location?” Sulu asked. She got up from her chair and mounted the steps to the outer ring of the bridge.
“Negative,” Tenger said. “All the satellites we’ve seen are in low orbit, but . . . there is a trail.”
Sulu stood beside the security chief, peering down at the tactical console. “Where does it lead?”
Tenger examined the trajectory. The result surprised him. “It leads down to the planet,” he said. He adjusted the sensors, targeting them to follow the run of particles to their end. “It goes all the way down to the surface.”
“What’s there?” Sulu asked.
“Scanning,” Tenger said. “There is a metal-encased structure. It is intact. It doesn’t read like a crash site. In fact . . .” He had focused the sensors narrowly, but the extent of the readings exceeded those limits. He widened the targeted area. “The object is huge. It measures more than a kilometer long . . .” He continued to expand the zone until he could read the entire object. “It is nearly two kilometers long and roughly toroidal in shape. It is lying flat on the ground.”
“Is that a building?” Commander Linojj asked, striding over from her first officer’s station. “Perhaps a launch facility of some kind?”
“The particle trail tracks directly to the structure, so that is a possibility,” Tenger said. He enlarged the region of his scans even further. “There is a series of low buildings eleven kilometers away. The nearest settlement beyond that is several hundred kilometers distant.”
The captain looked over to the sciences station. “Are there any life signs?”
“Indeterminate,” Fenn said. “The interfering substrate in the crust appears all over the planet.”
“Have any of the probes scanned this site?” Sulu asked.
“Checking,” Fenn said. It took the science officer thirty seconds to arrive at an answer. “No, sir,” she said. “We could route the closest probe to be there in less than four hours, or launch another probe to get there in about half that time.”
“Launch another probe,” Sulu ordered. “In the meantime, let’s send down a landing party to see if we can make sense of any of this.”
As Tenger prepared to send another class-three probe into the atmosphere, Commander Linojj formed another landing party. She selected Ensign Young, Doctor Morell, and Crewman Permenter again, but chose another member of the security team and an assistant science officer rather than Tenger and Fenn, no doubt because of their responsibilities in programming and launching the new probe. Although Tenger would have preferred to transport back down to the planet, it contented him to execute the duties the captain had assigned him. He cared far less about which tasks he performed in the crew’s quest for answers than he did about finding those answers. He could only hope that what lay below on the planet surface would help them discover what had happened to the people of Rejarris II.
♦ ♦ ♦
The brilliant blue-white shimmer of the transporter effect cleared from Linojj’s vision, but she immediately squinted at a different sort of brightness. A white-gray spread of snow and ash swathed the ground in all directions. Linojj held up her hand against the glare while she gave her eyes a moment to grow accustomed to it. She didn’t think she would need the polarized goggles she’d brought with her, stuffed into one of the pockets in the cold-weather jacket she wore. The smoke that filled the sky dimmed the daytime hours on Rejarris II, and the ash combined with the snow to dull its albedo.
The first officer rounded on her heel to ensure that the entire landing party had successfully transported with her, and that they faced no unforeseen dangers. Doctor Morell stood beside Linojj, with Ensign Young and Assistant Science Officer Sandra Alderson behind, and security personnel Permenter and Günther Haas at the rear of the group. Linojj could see the water vapor in their breath condensing before each of them in the cold air. The first landing party to Rejarris II had explored a city near the equator, but the second had just beamed down to a location at a more northerly latitude, with commensurately lower temperatures. The snow, at least, indicated that the planet had begun to heal itself after the asteroid strike.
Linojj pulled her communicator from where it hung at the back of her waist, beneath her tunic and jacket, and she flipped open its gold-colored grille. The black gloves she wore, fashioned from a flexibly thin fabric, insulated her hands against the cold weather but did not impede her dexterity. “Linojj to Enterprise.”
A moment passed, and then the captain herself responded. “Enterprise, Sulu here,” she said. “Go ahead, Commander.”
“We’ve beamed to the planet’s surface without incident,” the first officer reported.
“Do you see the structure?”
Glinveer Ved, the only Tellarite among the Enterprise crew and the ship’s transporter chief, had followed the run of particles from orbit, setting down the landing party a hundred or so paces outside the structure to which the trail led. “Yes, I see it,” Linojj said. “We’re on a broad, snow-covered plain, and the structure is lying across our path. It stretches away in either direction until it fades from view.”
“Do you have any initial impressions?” Sulu asked.
“Like everything else we’ve seen on this planet, it appears unoccupied,” Linojj said. “Other than that, no, sir.”
“All right, Commander,” the captain said. “Observe standard procedures. Contact the ship every thirty minutes.”
“Understood.”
“Enterprise out.”
Linojj returned the communicator to the back of her uniform pants. She heard the sound of first one and then two more tricorders as Morell, Young, and Alderson initiated scans. “Do you read any life signs in the area, Doctor?”
“No,” Morell said. Her cheeks had turned rosy on her well-lined face. She wore the same black gloves as Linojj did, as well as a black knit hat pulled down over her curly white hair, but neither seemed to mitigate the effect of the cold on the older woman. “Whatever that structure is, it’s not resistant to our sensors. I detect no life-forms inside it or anywhere in the area.”
“What about in the set of buildings nearby?”
“I read them,” Morell said. “They’re eleven-point-one klicks south-southeast of here. At that distance, my tricorder’s biosensors can’t overcome the interference from the substrate in the soil, so life signs are indeterminate.”
“Understood,” Linojj said. The news did not concern her. It seemed wildly unlikely to her that the planet would lack life everywhere they searched, but that the natives would populate an isolated building complex. She raised her arm and waved the way forward. “Let’s approach.”
The first officer started toward the structure. The snow rose ten centimeters and crunched beneath her boots, the footing awkward but not onerous. A light but frosty wind blew steadily toward Linojj and her crewmates, occasionally gusting and carrying granules of snow and ash against the exposed flesh of her face. Although she needed to turn her head and avert her eyes several times as they walked, she counted the wind as an ally, since it likely accounted for the relatively low accumulation on the ground. She imagined tall drifts forming in the distance behind the landing party, swept into existence by the bursts of moving air.
As they neared the structure, its size became apparent. Its dark, blue-gray surface bowed toward them, and she estimated its height at twelve to fifteen meters. Snow and ash dusted its upper half like frosting on a cake—or, considering the structure’s shape, like frosting on a doughnut. The curvature of its length took it quickly out of sight to the left and right of the winter landscape. Although smooth along some portions of its visible surface, it also contained numerous seamed areas studded with instrumentation. It looked to Linojj like an enlarged version of a duotronic conduit aboard Enterprise.
Ensign Young stepped up between Linojj and Morell. “Its outer surface is composed primarily of titanium, aluminum, and magnesium, although my tricorder is also reading several metal-matrix composites with ceramic and organic polymers. It has a circular cross section of fourteen-point-three meters in diameter, and . . .” Young moved closer to the object and crouched down before it. A narrow, dark brown strip ran tucked beneath the lower arc of the structure, free from snow and ash. “It’s also sitting atop a thick metal slab, although it’s not connected to it.”
“Is that a foundation?” Linojj asked. “Is this a building? Or is it a conduit of some kind?”
“Neither, I think,” said Lieutenant Alderson. She stepped forward and walked slowly along the structure, referring to the display on her own tricorder. “It’s not hollow, but filled with circuitry. Scans show some recognizable equipment: solar cells, force-field generators, antigravs, thrusters—”
“Thrusters?” Linojj said. “Could this be a spacecraft? Maybe one that didn’t originate on this planet?” Solar cells could have been used for energy collection, force-field generators to erect shields for protection during both spaceflight and atmospheric insertion, antigravs for liftoff and landing, thrusters for maneuvering and station-keeping.
“Possibly an automated vessel,” Alderson said. “Although I suppose there could be a crew deck or compartment somewhere within the object. It’ll take some time to scan the entire ring.”
“I’m not sure it’s of extraterrestrial origin,” Young said, standing back up. “Everything inside falls within the level of technological sophistication we observed in the city. Plus the metal slab it’s sitting on could serve as a landing pad.”
Linojj considered the object and its remoteness from any cities, but its relative proximity to the nearby buildings. “If this is a spacecraft, or even just a satellite, could the complex eleven kilometers away function as its mission control? A facility utilized to launch and retrieve it, to maintain and monitor it?”
“It’s possible,” Alderson allowed. “We’d need to investigate the complex to understand its capabilities, and to look for any linkage with the object.”
“All right,” Linojj said. “Let’s learn as much as we can here first. I want to know if this was ever in space, and what its primary function is.” The first officer drew her own tricorder out of a jacket pocket as the landing party spread out alongside the object. Permenter took up a position at one end of the group, while Haas stationed himself at the other.
Linojj felt the chill in the air ease as she walked beside the object, which functioned in the middle of the empty plain as a windbreak. Inspecting the display of her tricorder, she saw the profusion of circuitry Alderson had detected. When Linojj had assembled the landing party, she’d considered enlisting the ship’s chief engineer, Rafaele Buonarroti, or one of his staff, but at the time, she and the rest of the bridge crew had believed the great ring-shaped structure a building, not some massive technological object. Once she and the others had completed a preliminary examination of it, Linojj would contact Enterprise and request the assistance of an engineering team.
The first officer continued along the object, logging everything that her tricorder scanned. A series of narrow tubes in one section read as power-transfer conduits, while those in another section showed as hydraulic hoses. She saw a device mingling solid-state and mechanical components, which she judged an inertial stabilizer. She spotted an external emitter and tracked its connection to an internal gimbal and actuator, clearly one of the thrusters Alderson had mentioned.
“Commander.” Up ahead, Ensign Young had turned back to face her. As she walked over to him, he alternately checked his tricorder and gazed up at the object.
“What is it, Ensign?”
“I’ve found a breach in the object’s casing,” Young said. “Or its hull. Commander Tenger detected ionized metallic elements in orbit that he thought could have been the result of an explosion, and a stream of those elements led here. If this was out in space, if this is a spacecraft or a satellite, this could be what exploded. Maybe that’s even why it’s here: for repairs.”
“Repairs by who?” Linojj asked. She took a few steps back from the object and looked up at it, but she could see no sign of a breached hull. She raised her tricorder and ran her own scan. A gaping wound appeared at once, running from the top of the object and along the upper half of its inner side, out of view of the landing party. “I see it,” she said. “I’ll call down a shuttlecraft so we can take a look at it firsthand.”
Linojj reached for her communicator, but Young stepped to the side and pointed. The first officer followed his gesture and saw two parallel series of evenly spaced notches in the side of the object, leading both up and down as far as she could see. “I think I can scale it,” Young said.
Linojj tucked her fingers into one of the indentations. It felt snug, and the first officer imagined that it had been made for a different purpose, or perhaps to fit the tapered ends of the vine-like appendages she’d seen in the pictures of Rejarris II natives. She kicked the toe of her boot into another notch lower down, which also felt tight, but when she lifted up her free foot to test her weight on the makeshift hand- and footholds, they seemed functional enough. “Exercise caution,” she told the ensign.
Young pocketed his tricorder in his jacket, then reached up and set his hands in two of the indentations, the right higher than the left. He started climbing, his initial progress slow because of the outward curve of the metal, but when he reached the halfway point, he moved more quickly. Linojj took eight or ten paces backward so that she could better view his ascent. The ensign began stopping at every other notch, letting go with one hand, and brushing away the snow and ash that had collected on the object.
As Young neared the top, he called out. “I see the breach, Commander.” He swept away a final patch of snow and ash, then scrabbled up onto his knees. Unlike Doctor Morell, the ensign had not chosen to wear a hat, and Linojj saw his short brown hair whipped into a frenzy, the object no longer running interference between Young and the wind. “There’s considerable damage,” he yelled down, but the first officer could barely make out his words. She reached for her communicator, held it up for the ensign to see, then opened it with a flick of her wrist.
“Linojj to Young.” She saw him take out his own communicator and speak into it.
“Young here. I was saying that the breach is considerable, Commander. The metal along the edges is mangled and charred. It’s also bent inward, not outward. It looks as though it might have been caused by weapons fire. I’m going to scan it.” Still on his knees, the ensign set down his communicator, then retrieved his tricorder and activated it. Linojj could just hear the shrill plaint of its operation, intermittently carried away by the wind.
After a few moments, Young picked up his communicator again. “I read charged particles,” he said. “The patterns of force do suggest an external explosion.”
Linojj questioned who would have attacked the people of Rejarris II and why. From what they had so far gleaned, it made little sense to her, since, by all indications, they had barely even left their own planet, and had yet to travel among the stars. The first officer’s thoughts led her to consider the Tzenkethi again, not only the nearest spacefaring species, but one with a reputation for an overaggressive approach to protecting their border regions. At the same time, she wondered about the purpose of the object—was it a spacecraft, or a satellite, or something else entirely? “What can you see inside?” she said into her communicator. “Can you tell anything about it, or about its builders?”
The ensign put down his tricorder and leaned forward on one hand. “It reminds me of a display at the Museum of Engineering in Rotterdam,” Young said. Linojj had never heard of either the institution or the place, but she took the ensign’s meaning. “There’s a lot of old-fashioned solid-state circuitry organized into—” Young abruptly stopped talking, and Linojj saw him look to one side, away from her. “This is odd, Commander,” he said. “I’m looking at the ground on the other side of the object. It doesn’t seem the same as the ground where you’re standing. For one thing, there’s no ash or snow.”
“Could it simply be a result of the wind patterns inside the ring?” Linojj asked.
“It’s not that,” Young said. “It’s that I thought I saw snow when I first climbed up here, but now, as far as I can see, the terrain is dark and strewn with rocks and boulders.”
Boulders? That didn’t sound right to Linojj. She examined her own surroundings, and though concealed in sheets of snow and ash, the topography appeared flat. No outcroppings rose up to suggest that any boulders dotted the area. “What do your sensors show?”
Young picked up his tricorder and sat back on his heels. Still holding his communicator, he deftly used one hand to scan the land on the other side of the object. “This doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “My tricorder is showing snow on the ground, and high drifts against the inner side of the structure. I’m also getting no readings at all of boulders.” He stood up. “I can’t—”
A loud hum burst from Linojj’s communicator, and she peered down at it, startled. When she looked back up, she saw Young lunge away from her and disappear, as though he had suddenly decided to leap from atop the object and down the other side. She thought she heard him cry out above the rush of the wind, but then his exclamation unexpectedly ceased. “Ensign!” Linojj called into her communicator, even as she started to run. “Ensign Young!”
When she received no response, she quickly thumbed the reset button on the device before bringing it back up to her mouth. “Linojj to landing party. Emergency. Meet at my location.” She reached the object, clapped her communicator onto the back of her waist, and started to climb. She’d reached the halfway point when Permenter and Alderson arrived from one direction, and Haas and Morell from the other.
“Commander,” one of the security guards called up to her.
Linojj stopped and called back over her shoulder. “Ensign Young fell from the top of the structure onto the other side, and now he’s not responding,” she said. “Contact the Enterprise and prepare for emergency transport.”
“Yes, sir,” one of the guards said. Linojj heard the activation chirp of a communicator, followed by words she could not make out over the wind, which had picked up the higher she’d climbed.
As the first officer reached the top of the object, she stopped and carefully let go with one hand. From beneath the back of her tunic and jacket, she drew her phaser. She adjusted it to its highest nonlethal setting, then yanked herself into a kneeling position on top of the object.
The force of the wind struck her first, sending the long strands of her purple hair flying about her head. She ignored it and looked down the other side of the object. She saw the great, dark expanse that Young had described, filled with rocks large and small, but she did not see Young. Thinking he had fallen too close to the structure for her to see, she stood up. She heard a loud hum, and then a bright light flashed just below her. She quickly dropped into a prone position as a cone of golden illumination streaked above her.
Linojj aimed her phaser at the light’s point of origin, not much more than a few meters away from her on the surface of the object. An emitter exploded in a shower of sparks. The beam vanished.
“Commander!” yelled one of the security guards.
“I’m all right,” Linojj called down. “Stand by.” Leading with her phaser, she crept forward, staying low. The surface of the object began to curve downward, and the first officer used the notches—which apparently continued around the entire circumference—to keep from sliding down. She had gone just about as far as she could while facing forward when she at last saw a human foot. Linojj edged forward until she could see Young’s entire body. He sat on the ground—on dark earth, amid rocks and boulders. “Ensign,” she yelled to him. He cradled one arm in the other, obviously nursing an injury he’d endured in the fall, but he appeared otherwise unhurt. His tricorder lay in pieces beside him. “Ensign!”
Young gave no indication that he heard her. Linojj wondered if he’d struck his head when he’d fallen and damaged his hearing. She tried once more, without success, then reached for her communicator. “Linojj to Enterprise.”
“Enterprise here,” said Captain Sulu. “Commander, sensors are showing power flowing through the structure, and we’ve detected energy surges at your position.”
“We’re aware that the structure now has power,” Linojj said. “Our immediate concern, though, is Ensign Young, who has fallen fifteen meters to the ground from atop the structure. He’s conscious, but he hurt his arm and may have suffered other injuries. Doctor Morell can’t get to him, so I’m requesting emergency medical transport.”
To her credit, the captain did not waste any time asking for additional details. Instead, Linojj heard her say, “Keep this channel open,” and then, “Sulu to transporter room. Beam up Ensign Young at once. We have a medical emergency.” Linojj watched Young, waiting for the bluish-white motes of dematerialization to form around him.
It didn’t happen.
“Captain, is something wrong?” the first officer asked.
Linojj heard indistinct conversation over her communicator, and then the captain said, “Commander, Lieutenant Ved reports that he can establish transporter locks on everybody except Ensign Young.”
“Maybe the ensign’s signal enhancer was damaged in his fall,” Linojj conjectured. Because of the substance in the ground that interfered with biosensors, each member of the landing party carried a small tracking device designed to facilitate transport in such conditions; those devices also had the benefit of individually identifying the carriers. Lieutenant Ved understood the transporter and its related systems better than anybody Linojj had ever met, so she knew that if he couldn’t establish a lock, then nobody could. “I’ll give my enhancer to Ensign Young, which may take a few minutes.”
“Understood,” Sulu said. “In the meantime, I’ll send down a shuttlecraft just in case that doesn’t work.”
“That’s a good idea, Captain,” Linojj said, “but one of the energy surges your sensors showed was a beam of some kind fired from the structure in my direction.”
“Was it an energy weapon?” Sulu asked.
“I don’t know,” Linojj said. “I didn’t have time to analyze it before I destroyed its emitter. I think it might have been a directional beam, though, and that it might have pulled Ensign Young from where he’d climbed up onto the structure.”
“It was a tractor beam, then?”
“Or something like it, yes,” Linojj said. “Regardless, it could be that the structure is what’s interfering with the signal enhancer. It might also explain why I can’t reach him by communicator. Ensign Young fell into the interior of its ring shape, while the rest of us are outside it—or in my case, on top of it.”
“All right, see if you can move Ensign Young out of there,” Sulu said. “A shuttlecraft will be launching shortly.”
“Thank you, Captain,” Linojj said.
“Enterprise out.”
The first officer again touched her communicator’s reset button. “Linojj to Permenter.”
“Permenter here,” came the immediate reply. Linojj explained the situation to the security guard, including her intention to retrieve Young, either by transporter or, if necessary, by physical means. “Have the rest of the landing party stay close. Doctor Morell and Lieutenant Alderson should continue scanning the object, alert for the discharge of any beams. They should learn whatever they can about its power: its source, its distribution, what kind of reserves it might have.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Linojj out.” She peered back down the side of the object at Young, then attempted to contact him again via communicator, to no avail. As she watched him, though, he clambered to his feet and began to study his surroundings. She waved to him, thinking that even if he could not hear her calls or the signal of his communicator, then maybe she could get his attention visually. Even though Young appeared to look all around, and sometimes even in her direction, her efforts didn’t work.
The ensign reached to the back of his waist, perhaps for his phaser, but Linojj thought it more likely that he wanted his communicator. His hand came away empty, though, and he began searching the ground about him. After a few moments, he stopped, raised a hand to his mouth, and called out. Linojj heard nothing but the wind.
Exchanging her communicator for her tricorder, she scanned Young—or at least she tried to do so. When sensors did not register the ensign, Linojj directed them at the ground. They didn’t reflect what she saw, but instead showed snow and ash covering flat terrain. The disconnect between her own senses and those of the tricorder troubled her. She began to think that when Young had fallen, he’d landed much farther from where he’d started than it appeared.
Trying a different tack, Linojj cautiously rose up onto her knees. She then reached back and, with an underhand motion, tossed her tricorder from atop the object. She watched it fall toward the ground, expecting to see it vanish in midair, to land in the place her sensors read, not in the place Ensign Young stood.
But the tricorder didn’t disappear. Instead, it dropped all the way to the ground, landing just a few meters from Young. When it struck, he spun around toward it.
He heard it, Linojj thought. But he can’t hear me, and I can’t hear him. That seemed to buttress her instinct that Young had crossed some threshold and now stood in another place—perhaps in another time or another dimension.
The ensign strode over to the tricorder and bent to examine it. He seemed reluctant at first to touch it, but he eventually did. Linojj wished that she’d recorded a message on it, but at least she knew that, if she needed to make contact with him, she could.
Young glanced upward, as though searching for the source of the tricorder. Linojj wondered if he could see the structure on Rejarris II that the landing party had come to investigate. As though in answer, the ensign looked directly at her, but the first officer saw no recognition in his eyes, no awareness that she was even there.
I have to get him back, Linojj thought. She quickly scrambled around, found the indentations in the metal casing of the object, and began to climb down, toward Young. She descended as fast as she could, but then the toe of her boot struck something hard. Linojj looked down past her body to see that a wide, flat metal surface protruded from the object at the midpoint of its height. She checked left and right and saw that it continued in both directions, like a long shelf.
Linojj tested her weight on it. It held and, more than that, it felt solid. She let go of the handholds and dropped onto it, lowering herself to her knees. She unclasped the signal enhancer from her wrist, then tossed it to the ground.
Young heard the device land, and he immediately went to it. As Linojj had hoped, he strapped it onto his own wrist. He gazed up toward her again, but she could tell that he still couldn’t see her.
Linojj contacted Enterprise again, informing the captain that the ensign apparently could neither see nor hear her, and that all attempts to communicate with him had failed. The first officer also told Sulu that she’d given her enhancer to Young and requested that he be transported up. Once more, she waited to see him dematerialize. Instead, she heard the captain’s voice.
“Lieutenant Ved can’t establish transporter locks on either you or Ensign Young,” Sulu said.
“Understood, Captain,” Linojj said. “I’m going to try to retrieve him myself.”
“I sent Commander Tenger down on Amundsen,” Sulu said. “He should arrive before long.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Linojj out.” She closed her communicator. Below her, Ensign Young faced in her direction. Still on her knees, she quickly bent down to the metal shelf and reached past it. She waved her arm, hoping that Young would see it. When Linojj looked at him, though, she saw his mouth drop open in an expression of surprise, and she reflexively pulled back up.
Pain like she’d never known seared through Linojj’s arm. Her eyes slammed shut as her mind shrieked in agony. She thought she cried out too, but she didn’t know. She fell forward onto the metal shelf, her shoulder striking it hard, but the impact didn’t register at all. Linojj felt only the terrible sensations in her arm, which felt as though it was being torn from her body.
She heard someone breathing hard and realized that it must be her. Wanting to see how badly her arm had been injured, she held it up before her face and opened her eyes. She thought for an instant that she was looking in the wrong place, but then she saw the stub of her arm that remained. Everything below her biceps was gone, as though it had been sheared off. Bright red blood gushed from the wound. Flesh and tendon and muscle fluttered horrifically, and in the center of the mutilated limb, she saw the white nub of her bone.
She screamed until blackness took her.