“Commander, sensors are showing two energy surges at the structure,” said Lieutenant Rainbow Sky.
Tenger—Enterprise’s chief of security and, in the absence of Demora Sulu and Xintal Linojj, the ship’s acting captain—rotated the command chair to face the Native American officer crewing the tactical station. “Can you tell the nature of the surges?” he asked. Captain Sulu had arrived at the planet’s surface aboard Amundsen only a few minutes earlier, and already Tenger’s concerns for her welfare grew.
Rainbow Sky’s hands gamboled across the tactical console with speed and grace, eliciting a series of chirps and tones in response. “The surges originated at different points on the structure,” he said. “Energy beams of some kind are firing on the shuttlecraft, and . . . I’m reading a third beam now . . . and a fourth.”
Tenger looked to Lieutenant Commander Kanchumurthi at the communications station. “Open a channel to Amundsen.” As the comm officer worked his panel, Tenger stabbed at the controls on the arm of the command chair. “Bridge to transporter room.”
“Transporter room,” came the coarse voice of Lieutenant Ved. “Go ahead, Commander.”
“Establish transporter locks on Captain Sulu and Ensign Kostas aboard Amundsen,” Tenger said. “Prepare for emergency beam-out.”
“Yes, sir. Right away.”
“Channel open to Amundsen,” Kanchumurthi said.
Tenger tapped a second control. “Enterprise to Captain Sulu.”
“Commander,” said Rainbow Sky, urgency in his voice. “Amundsen just fell off sensors.”
Tenger didn’t hesitate. “Transporter room, energize.” He waited, knowing that it was already too late. A few seconds later, Lieutenant Ved confirmed it.
“Bridge, this is the transporter room,” he said. “Emergency beam-out failed. I established transporter locks, but lost them just before the order to energize. Subsequent attempts to reacquire the locks have been unsuccessful.”
“Acknowledged,” Tenger said. “Keep trying, Lieutenant.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Bridge out.” Tenger rose from the command chair and climbed the steps beside the tactical console. He could feel the tension mounting among his crewmates, so he asked loudly enough for all of them to hear the question to which they all needed an answer. “Was the shuttlecraft destroyed?”
“No, sir, not that I can tell,” Rainbow Sky said. “Sensors did not pick up any indications of an explosion or a crash.”
“What about the beams?” Tenger wanted to know. “Could they be masking the shuttlecraft?”
“I don’t think so,” Rainbow Sky said. “For one thing, they’ve stopped. For another, I could read the shuttlecraft even after the beams started, and their intensity didn’t increase while they lasted. In fact, one of the beams, the last one, failed almost immediately.”
Tenger tried to consider all of the possibilities. “Could they have been transporter beams? Could they have beamed Amundsen away?”
“They didn’t read like that,” Rainbow Sky said. “Plus the infrastructure on the planet and the level of technology suggest that the native population hadn’t yet developed transporters.”
“That’s not categorical, though,” Tenger said. “And we’re not that sure of our facts. The structure is isolated from every settlement on the planet, so it’s possible that it might not even be of indigenous origin.”
“Still, they didn’t read like a transporter,” Rainbow Sky said. “If anything, they resembled tractor beams, although I saw fluctuations in them, which you wouldn’t expect from a directional force.”
Tenger glanced at the tactical display, where a readout showed a line rendering of the structure and Amundsen above it. “Where did the sensors lose contact with the shuttlecraft?”
“Here,” Rainbow Sky said, pointing to an area inside the ring. “Very close to where Ensign Young fell from the structure.”
“What was Amundsen’s altitude when it dropped from our scans?” Tenger asked.
Rainbow Sky touched several controls in a short sequence. The image on the display changed, rotating from a vertical view to a horizontal one. Seen through the linear representation of the structure, the shuttlecraft flew not very far above the ground. “Between seven and eight meters.”
“They were landing,” Tenger said, more to himself than to Rainbow Sky. “They were landing, and they were going to come down inside the structure. When Ensign Young fell into the structure, we lost contact with him, even though Commander Linojj could still see him.”
“Do you think the shuttlecraft is still down there, and that we simply can’t communicate with the captain?” Rainbow Sky asked.
“Perhaps,” Tenger said. “Captain Sulu might have landed Amundsen in an attempt to retrieve the ensign.”
“Meaning that the shuttlecraft could reappear at any time,” Rainbow Sky said, “once the captain recovers Ensign Young and starts back to the ship.”
“Perhaps,” Tenger said again, though he suspected that a resolution would not prove quite so simple. “Monitor that area on sensors for any sign of Amundsen.”
“Aye, sir.”
Tenger considered how best to proceed. One thing seemed abundantly clear to him: with three crew members—including Captain Sulu—out of touch on Rejarris II, and a fourth in sickbay with a missing limb, the security chief would refuse to send anybody else down to the structure, either by transporter or shuttlecraft. “How long before the probe reaches the structure?” The captain had ordered the probe to the site when the crew had first discovered the unexplained object.
Rainbow Sky checked his console. “Twenty-five minutes, sir.”
“All right,” Tenger said, stepping back down from the outer ring of the bridge. “I want to see images the moment the probe is in position.” He sat in the command chair, wondering what those images would show. He expected to see Amundsen intact on the surface of the planet, inside the structure, and to verify that Captain Sulu and the others had survived. If so, he and the crew would need to figure out how to get them back to Enterprise, and before that, how to communicate with them.
About the latter, Tenger already had an idea.
♦ ♦ ♦
From where she sat at Amundsen’s main console, Sulu looked over her shoulder to the starboard aft corner of the cabin, where she and Kostas had moved away the chairs in favor of an antigrav stretcher. As she watched, the engineer-cum-medic finished securing the portable cot to the bulkhead. After the ensign had treated Young’s injuries as best she could, Sulu had returned to the shuttlecraft so that she could position it closer to the wounded man. Before moving Amundsen, though, the captain had attempted to contact Enterprise, without result.
Once Sulu had relocated the shuttlecraft, she and Kostas had deployed the stretcher. They carefully shifted Young onto it, then carried him aboard. He remained unconscious by virtue of a sedative.
Kostas walked back to the front of the cabin and sat beside Sulu. “We’re all set, sir.”
“Good. I’ve programmed a course that follows in reverse the shuttlecraft’s precise movements, not just once we reached the planet’s surface, but all the way from orbit,” Sulu explained. “I’m not sure if the structure is still out there and we just can’t see it or scan it, if it’s disguised somehow, or if our perceptions are somehow being altered or manipulated, but I want to retrace our route to see if we can get back to the Enterprise that way.”
In truth, Sulu suspected something entirely different. While Kostas had been tending to Young outside the shuttlecraft, the captain had turned toward the section of the structure closest to them—toward where she remembered that section to be—and she’d begun walking. She moved carefully, with one hand held up, palm out, in front of her chest. She estimated the distance of their location from the structure at between ten and twenty meters. She turned back once she’d gone fifty.
“While we’re close to the surface, scan for the structure,” Sulu told Kostas. “Once we’re in orbit, look for the Enterprise.”
“Yes, sir.”
The captain executed a standard safety checklist, then lifted off. Amundsen rose only a short distance, then glided back to where it had first touched down. It landed beside the dead creature, then launched again. As the shuttlecraft reached the point where the gold beams had shot toward it, Sulu saw Kostas brace herself with a hand to the edge of her console. The captain didn’t bother, and the moment passed without incident.
Sulu kept her attention on the view through the forward port. She hoped to see the structure suddenly reappear, to see a broad plain mantled in the off-white mixture of snow and ash, but as Amundsen traveled outward to twenty-five meters, and then to fifty, and finally to a hundred, she thought that less and less likely. Instead, she glimpsed a nearby mountain range she hadn’t seen on the journey down from Enterprise, covered in what looked like old-growth trees, something completely missing from the impact-winter landscape they’d to that point observed on Rejarris II.
As the shuttlecraft gained altitude, the captain hailed Enterprise. She made multiple attempts. She received no reply. When Sulu at last stopped, Ensign Kostas spoke into the ensuing silence.
“Captain, there’s no continuous cloud cover,” she said quietly. “The continent below us has mature vegetation and a different coastline than our probes mapped. Gravity—” Her voice dropped to a whisper when she uttered the word, as though she wanted to hide what she intended to say—perhaps not from Sulu so much as from herself. “The planet’s gravity is ten-point-two-nine meters per second squared. The Enterprise’s sensors recorded it as nine-point-six.”
“Ensign,” Sulu said, “I don’t think that’s Rejarris Two below us anymore.”
“No, sir,” Kostas replied, the resignation in her voice not quite masking a hint of fear. “But how? And where are we?”
“I don’t know where we are,” Sulu said, “but I think that the structure acted as a gateway. When we descended into it to rescue Ensign Young, we passed into another place.”
“But then why didn’t we return to Rejarris Two when we flew back up?” Kostas asked.
“I don’t know, Ensign,” Sulu said. “The best theory I can formulate is that the gateway physically displaces items that pass through it into another location, to wherever we are now. But the gateway doesn’t exist here, only on Rejarris Two, so we have no means of returning there.”
“Then how are we going to get back to the Enterprise?”
“Ensign, what I just told you is only a theory, so the first thing we’re going to do is test it,” Sulu said. “That means achieving orbit and searching for the Enterprise. It might be that our initial readings of Rejarris Two were inaccurate, that our senses and sensors were somehow deceived. If that’s the case, then the Enterprise might still be circling the planet.”
“Yes, sir,” Kostas said. She sounded unconvinced.
They continued their journey in Amundsen, mostly in silence. Kostas regularly checked on the status of Ensign Young, whose condition she continued to report as unchanged. The captain periodically attempted to raise Enterprise, never successfully.
Once the shuttlecraft achieved orbit, Kostas scanned for the starship. Sensors could not find Enterprise, although they did detect the same neutrino trail embedded in subspace that Tenger and Fenn had earlier. Sulu didn’t know what to make of that, but it seemed to her too significant a reading to discount as coincidence. It probably meant that the same starship had visited both Rejarris II and the planet below—and they did seem to be two different worlds, considering that two moons circled the former, and Sulu and Kostas could find none revolving around the latter. Neither could they locate any of the artificial satellites that had been orbiting Rejarris II.
“Why?” Kostas asked.
“Why what, Ensign?” Sulu asked.
“Why would anybody construct a gateway that operated only in one direction?” she asked. She sounded frustrated, but the captain also suspected that the young officer worried about being stranded in an unknown place, with no means of getting home.
“Perhaps they didn’t have the time or the knowledge to build a two-way gateway,” Sulu suggested. “Or perhaps they only needed to travel in one direction.”
The ensign’s eyes widened in sudden understanding. “The asteroid,” she said.
“Yes,” Sulu agreed. “Maybe the people of Rejarris Two knew that an asteroid was headed for the world and that the collision would have a devastating effect, not only on the people it killed directly, but on all those left behind to endure an impact winter. They didn’t have warp capability, but maybe they discovered another way to escape the pending disaster.”
“But then where are they?” Kostas asked.
“I don’t know,” the captain said, “but on our way back down to the surface, scan for life signs.”
“We’re heading back down to the planet?”
“At the moment,” Sulu said, “we have nowhere else to go.”
♦ ♦ ♦
Amid the tension pervading the bridge, Rafaele Buonarroti felt out of place at the first officer’s station, even though he’d reconfigured half of it as an engineering panel. He’d certainly crewed the exec’s console before—had done so on numerous occasions—but never as the result of such disastrous circumstances, with Captain Sulu missing and Commander Linojj so terribly wounded. Consequently, when he peered at the image on the main viewscreen, he couldn’t contain his reaction. “Cosa nell’universo è?” he said: What in the universe is that?
“The probe’s sensors are unable to read anything on the ground inside the ring of the structure other than ash and snow,” said Borona Fenn from her position at the sciences station.
“Not to point out the obvious,” said Gaia Aldani at navigation, “but there’s no snow or ash visible anywhere that I can see except outside of the structure.”
Buonarroti studied the scene on the viewer, transmitted to Enterprise from a probe dispatched to observe Rejarris II inside its cloud cover. The chief engineer realized that he hadn’t even noticed the lack of the mixed accumulation within the structure, so focused had he been on the black beast in the center of the screen. He did note, however, that he saw neither the shuttlecraft nor any members of the landing parties—including Demora Sulu. “Is that a projection we’re seeing, then?” he wondered aloud. “Are we looking at an image created by the structure, maybe to hide what’s actually there?”
Fenn operated the probe’s sensors. “Nothing I see substantiates that,” she said.
“I agree,” said Rainbow Sky at tactical. “The structure is under power, but I do not detect anything like a visual projection. Even if an attempt were being made to hide something from view, though, our sensors are reading what is actually there.”
“Unless that too is a deception,” Buonarroti said, although he immediately saw the illogic of such a scheme, which Fenn quickly spelled out.
“If that were the case, why wouldn’t the two false images—the one presented to our eyes and the one presented to our scans—why wouldn’t they match?” she said. “It wouldn’t make sense to hide something by presenting two illusory images, when the very inconsistency of them would demonstrate that at least one of them must be false.”
“There is no deception,” Tenger said, his tone certain. He stood from the command chair and moved to the center of the bridge. “Commander Fenn, magnify the area that includes the many-legged animal, out to a distance of ten meters all around it.”
“Aye, sir.”
On the viewer, light-blue lines drew a rectangle about the designated area, which then expanded to fill the screen. The beast looked to Buonarroti as though some mad scientist had grafted spider and porcupine DNA onto that of a rhinoceros, then covered the result in black paint. He found it hideous. Since the probe had maneuvered into position above the structure and transmitted a live feed of it to Enterprise, nobody on the bridge had seen the beast move, and yet its still form unsettled Buonarroti.
Tenger circled the helm, climbed to the outer part of the bridge, and strode to the main viewer. He stood for a moment with his muscular arms folded across his burly chest and examined the image on the screen, then pointed to a section of the ground beside the beast. “What do you make of this?” he asked, apparently addressing everybody present.
Buonarroti rose and walked past the outer stations until he reached Tenger. He inspected the screen until he saw what the tactical officer had indicated: a long, straight-edged depression in the soil, slightly rounded at its extremities, with a perpendicular series of narrow V-shaped grooves toward one end. Up close, Buonarroti recognized it at once. “That’s the imprint of a shuttlecraft engine nacelle.”
“I believe it is,” Tenger said, and he gestured to a second depression parallel to the first, just visible near the bottom of the screen and not quite as easily discerned. Seen together, the markings could hardly be mistaken for anything but the artifacts of a Starfleet planetary shuttlecraft.
“Can you provide a scale for these?” the chief engineer asked Fenn.
“Because sensors are reading something different than what we see at that location, I can only establish an approximate scale,” Fenn said. “I can base it on the assumption that the altitude of the probe is the same above both the ground that the sensors detect and the ground that we see.” A distance gauge appeared at the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, and blue lines traced the linear measurements of the two indentations.
“Those are the right dimensions,” Buonarroti said. “The shuttlecraft did land there.”
“But why isn’t it still there?” asked Torsten Syndergaard at the helm.
“Because Captain Sulu and Ensign Kostas presumably recovered Ensign Young,” Tenger said, “after which they attempted to return to the Enterprise.”
“ ‘Attempted to return’?” Buonarroti said.
“Clearly they have not returned to the ship,” Tenger said, “nor have we detected them in orbit or received any messages from them. Considering everything that the crew have seen, scanned, and experienced, I have concluded that the structure is a portal of some kind.”
“Yes,” Fenn agreed. “A unidirectional portal.”
“Yes,” Tenger said.
“So you’re saying that Ensign Young fell from atop the structure, or was pulled from it, and passed into another place?” Buonarroti asked.
“Into another place or another time,” Tenger said. “Or perhaps both.”
Buonarroti considered whether the captain and the other members of the crew might have been displaced to another part of the planet, but then discounted the possibility. If they had ended up elsewhere on Rejarris II, they surely would have contacted Enterprise. Also, although the substrate in the planet’s soil interfered with biosensors, the probes had still made a visual record of every area over which they flew, and none of them had observed any large animal life, and especially nothing like the beast currently visible on the main screen, all of which bolstered the argument that the landscape they could see within the structure did not exist on the world they orbited. Tenger’s theory also made something else clear. “The one-way nature of the portal explains why none of our three missing crew have returned.”
“It might also explain Commander Linojj’s injury,” Fenn said. “If she reached her arm through the portal, past the threshold that marks the transition between one place and another, and then she tried to pull it back . . .” The science officer did not finish expressing the gruesome thought.
“What are we going to do?” Ramesh Kanchumurthi asked at communications. In response, Tenger turned toward Buonarroti, and the chief engineer understood why.
“If the portal functions in one direction, then we may be able to make it function in two,” Buonarroti said. “Or we might be able to reverse its flow.”
“Once you begun studying the device, choose the course that seems most quickly achievable,” Tenger said.
“Right,” Buonarroti said. “Can we transport an engineering team down, or should we use another shuttlecraft?”
“Neither,” Tenger said. “Until we have a solution, I will not risk losing any other members of the crew.”
“Meaning we’ll have to use ship’s sensors and those of the probes to analyze the guts of that thing,” Buonarroti said. “I’ll probably need Commander Fenn and some of her people. This is likely to be as much a scientific problem as it will be an engineering one.”
“All the resources of the Enterprise are at your disposal,” Tenger said.
Buonarroti thought about the enormous size of the device—essentially a tube fourteen meters in diameter stretched into a ring more than two kilometers long. He took some solace in the idea that the inhabitants of Rejarris II had reached a level of technological sophistication far short of the Federation. Still, if the portal possessed more than even a small fraction of unique components, it could take more than a few days or weeks, and more than the complement of a single starship, for the Enterprise crew to achieve their goal. Buonarroti didn’t bother to mention that to Tenger, who surely understood the complexity of the situation and would undoubtedly point out that the sooner their efforts began, the closer they would be to retrieving the captain and the two ensigns. In his position as the ship’s security chief, Tenger often acted with a dedication to poise and logic almost Vulcan-like in its consistency.
“Sir, until we have a means of altering the portal,” Aldani asked, “what about the captain and the others?”
Though he said nothing, Buonarroti wondered if the missing crew members were all still alive. The second landing party had not mentioned seeing the beast, meaning that it had entered the area around the time that Captain Sulu had taken Amundsen down to the surface. Its motionless body suggested a battle that the shuttlecraft crew and Ensign Young had won, but at what cost?
“Since circumstances have brought us to this conclusion, I assume that they will bring Captain Sulu and Ensigns Young and Kostas to the same conclusion,” Tenger said. “Since they have actually passed through the portal, though, they may possess additional information about it that would be of use to us in devising their return to the Enterprise.”
“But . . . what difference does that make if the portal functions in only one direction?” Syndergaard asked. Buonarroti wondered the same thing.
“It does not function entirely in one direction, a fact we have all witnessed,” Tenger said. “Because of that, I intend to have a conversation with Captain Sulu.”
♦ ♦ ♦
Amundsen glided in over the mountains and across the rocky plain, all of it awash in the pink glow of a gathering dusk. As on the shuttlecraft’s journey into orbit, Sulu had programmed their course to match its previous movements between earth and sky. She had no specific reason for doing so, other than the uncertainty of the situation.
“Scans are showing the carcass of the creature just ahead,” Kostas said. “It does not appear to have moved.”
“Thank you, Ensign,” Sulu said. She felt relieved at the information, not because the creature hadn’t somehow come back from the dead and scrambled away, but because she’d feared that they wouldn’t be able to locate the area to which the gateway had sent them, that somehow their setting had changed again. “I’m going to land in the area,” she told Kostas, “but beside the message Ensign Young etched, rather than next to the creature.” She worked the helm to alter the end of their flight plan. As she did, a warning klaxon blared to life in the cabin.
“Proximity alert,” announced Kostas. The ensign quickly quieted the alarm. “There’s something moving up ahead of us.” Once they had returned to Amundsen after battling the creature, Sulu had ordered Kostas to set the sensors to notify them of any significant motion within three kilometers of the shuttlecraft. “Scanning,” the ensign said. “It’s near our landing site. Near the body of the creature.”
As Sulu waited for more information, an indicator brightened on her console, accompanied by an alert tone. “We’re receiving an incoming transmission,” she said.
“From who?” Kostas asked, perplexity blended with excitement in her voice. Sulu shared her confusion; they hadn’t been able to communicate with Young through the gateway, nor had they been able to raise the ship once they’d followed the ensign, and so they’d inferred such contact impossible.
Sulu checked the provenance of the message before accepting it. “It’s on a Starfleet emergency channel,” she said. “It’s carrying a starship identification marker on it: it’s from the Enterprise.”
“They must have modified the gateway,” Kostas said, her bewilderment apparently dying away. “Maybe we can travel back through it now.”
“I don’t think we can leap to that conclusion,” Sulu said as she continued to evaluate the message. She checked its transmission source, which confirmed her suspicions. “This is being sent by a log buoy.”
“Do you think something happened to the Enterprise?” Kostas asked, clearly concerned. The crews of Starfleet vessels employed log buoys when circumstances prevented them from using their ship’s communications system while facing the impending capture or destruction of their starship.
“No, I think the ship is fine,” Sulu said. “I think that the crew have made the same determination that we have, that the structure is a gateway, and they sent the buoy through as a means of contacting us.”
Kostas worked the sensor panel. “Scans confirm that the movement up ahead was a log buoy setting down.”
Sulu accepted the transmission and turned to her left, to a display set into the port bulkhead. The skewed chevron of the Starfleet emblem appeared briefly, replaced by the olive-green face of Tenger. He sat at the desk in her office. Behind him, visible through a large port, the taupe form of Rejarris II spun slowly on its axis.
“Captain, I am recording this message for transfer to a log buoy, which I intend to send down to the planet and into the interior of the structure there,” the security chief said. “I am hopeful that you, Ensign Kostas, and Ensign Young are in good health. During your approach to the structure, sensor scans showed multiple energy surges, and we detected beams fired at Amundsen. We immediately attempted to establish transporter locks on you and Ensign Kostas, but were unable to do so. The shuttlecraft then vanished from sensors.”
Tenger exhibited the same professional demeanor he always did, but the captain thought she could perceive anxiety in him. Although the ship’s second officer, he’d rarely commanded the ship in times of crisis, since Sulu and Linojj seldom left Enterprise simultaneously. The captain didn’t think his unease the result of the sudden demands placed upon him, though, but of his concern for his four colleagues, two of whom he counted as close friends; Sulu and Linojj had been Tenger’s crewmates for more than a decade.
“When we could not reach you,” Tenger went on, “we continued with our plan to send a probe to the structure in order to study it visually. We can presently see the imprints of Amundsen’s engine nacelles in the ground, though we cannot see the shuttlecraft. We have formed the opinion that the structure is actually a spatial or temporal portal that has conveyed Ensign Young, Ensign Kostas, and you to another space or time.” Sulu hadn’t considered the possibility that the gateway might have sent her and the others into the past or the future. “We also believe that the portal functions in only one direction, though this is in part based upon our assumption that you tried unsuccessfully to return through it aboard the shuttlecraft, a fact we need you to confirm or refute.”
Sulu wondered just how Tenger thought she could do that, considering the one-direction nature of the gateway and their inability to establish a communications channel between Amundsen and Enterprise. Does he want me to use semaphores? she thought caustically. She then realized that she actually could do that—or at least something like it.
“Commander Buonarroti is currently leading an engineering team in evaluating the sensor readings and images of the portal, with the intention of learning how to modify it to allow us to safely retrieve you. Commander Fenn is likewise guiding a scientific team to find those answers. If there is any information you can provide from your perspective, it could aid us in our efforts.”
The captain would inform the Enterprise crew that the gateway—or the portal, as Tenger called it—did not exist in the place and time to which she and the ensigns had been delivered, thus confirming its one-way operation. Other than that, she didn’t know what she and Kostas could tell them that would assist with their rescue attempt. But maybe, it suddenly occurred to her, they could find a means of procuring such information.
Tenger’s message continued. “We have appended to this transmission a program that will allow you to record a message on a padd that will then be translated into text and continuously scrolled across the display. It will also transcribe sensor readings. If you return the shuttlecraft to its previous location and place the padd atop it in scrolling mode, the probe above the portal will allow us to read your message.”
Sulu thought the proposed method an inelegant yet likely effective solution to resolve their inability to communicate normally through the portal. She also noted that Tenger referred to the shuttlecraft’s previous location, singular, but she had landed Amundsen in two separate places: in the area beside which the creature lay dead, and the area beside where Ensign Young had begun to carve out his own message. She thought that meant that the Enterprise crew probably hadn’t seen the ensign’s improvised communiqué, perhaps because it had been swallowed by late-afternoon shadows. Sulu would therefore inform them of the words Young had so painstakingly engraved.
“Excuse me, Captain,” Kostas said, and Sulu reached forward to pause the security chief’s message. “We’ve almost reached the landing point.”
Sulu confirmed their location and course on the helm panel, then glanced through the forward viewport. Up ahead, the unmoving form of the creature sprawled across the landscape. Since last they had seen it, its legs had splayed out across the ground about it, like a visual representation of its life force slipping away. Beside it sat the Enterprise log buoy, a cylinder sitting on a three-legged base, with a bright green light blinking atop it.
The captain pulled the shuttlecraft from the flight plan she’d laid in and engaged manual control. She spotted the message Young had chiseled into the ground and landed beside it. Amundsen settled with a reassuringly solid thud.
“Any other movement out there, Ensign?” Sulu asked.
“No, sir,” Kostas said.
The captain resumed the playback of Tenger’s message. “It is possible that the portal has sent you to a present-day location in a neighboring star system, or within starship range of the Federation—or even to a world within the Federation itself. If such is the case, then we will abandon our rescue efforts and transmit a message to Starfleet Command so that the Enterprise or another vessel can be sent to retrieve you. You may be able to ascertain your position by analyzing the star patterns where you are.”
Sulu had already performed such an analysis when she and Kostas had taken the shuttlecraft into orbit in search of Enterprise. The computer had been unable to match any location within the Milky Way that had the starfield surrounding the planet. Wherever the portal had sent them, it had not been close to home.
“At the present time, Captain, I am not permitting anybody else to travel down to the surface of Rejarris Two, either by transporter or shuttlecraft. I may have to revisit that decision should a solution require a hands-on modification to the portal. Until then, we will work aboard the Enterprise to figure out a means of bringing you and the other crew members back to the ship. If you require any supplies, please let us know and we will send them through the portal to you.”
“At least we won’t die of thirst or starve to death,” Kostas said wryly. The ensign’s half-smile pleased Sulu, who’d seen earlier that the reality of being marooned far from Enterprise and the Federation filled Kostas with dread.
“I will provide a status report to you every two hours,” Tenger said. “The Enterprise carries only two more log buoys, after which time we will have to modify probes to carry our messages to you. It will take some time to exhaust those, but if necessary, we can begin transporting down encoded padds to a point just above the portal, with the expectation that gravity will then conduct them to you. We will maintain a continuous vigil on the shuttlecraft once it comes into view of the probe, so that you can relay a message to the ship at any time.” The security chief paused, as though searching for more to say. Finally, he ended the transmission with a simple, “Tenger out.”
When the Starfleet logo appeared, Sulu thumbed off the display. She checked the incoming feed and saw a file appended to it. Sulu saved it to the shuttlecraft’s internal memory. “I’ll get a padd,” she told Kostas. “Make sure that our proximity alert remains set.”
Sulu headed toward the equipment drawers in the aft bulkhead. She would load the program Tenger had sent onto a padd, then record a message to the security chief. She agreed with his decision not to allow any more of the crew down to Rejarris II, and she endorsed having the crew study the sensor readings of the portal. She would inform him of her own plans to take the shuttlecraft and—
As the captain pulled a padd out of an equipment drawer, she heard a hiss, like air escaping through a hole in an environmental suit. She imagined damage to the shuttlecraft, and even envisioned another creature outside tearing through the hull. When she followed the sound, though, it led her to Ensign Young, and the hiss turned into a gasp. “Ensign Kostas!” Sulu called, dropping the padd and moving to her ailing crewmate. “We have a problem.”
As Kostas hurried from the front of the cabin, Young began to cough, and pink spittle appeared on his lips. Sulu threw her hand beneath his back and hauled him to a sitting position. Kostas pulled her medical tricorder from where she’d set it on a chair and scanned Young.
“There’s fluid buildup in his lungs,” she said, her voice rising. “I need to . . . to administer a drug to dilate his veins.” She sounded as though on the verge of panic, though not uncertain about what she’d said. She spun around and looked all about the cabin, clearly searching for her medkit.
Sulu quickly wrapped an arm around Young’s chest and moved him backward, propping him up against the aft bulkhead. Then she turned to Kostas and took her by the shoulders. “Ensign, you can do this,” she said firmly. “I know you haven’t had much experience out in the field as a medic, but you trained for this. Let that take over.”
Kostas nodded mutely once, then said, “Yes, sir.” She took a deep breath, let it out. “Thank you, sir.” She looked back over at Young, then found her medkit where she’d left it, in a recess beneath the antigrav stretcher. As she armed herself with a hypospray and began preparing its contents, she said, “He’s going to need oxygen, Captain. There should be an emergency supply aboard.”
“I’ll get it,” Sulu said. She marched through the opening in the aft bulkhead and into the equipment storage area. She found several canisters of oxygen and masks by the environmental suits. If necessary, she thought, we can have the crew send down more oxygen from the ship.
The captain brought the canister and mask back out to the main cabin. Kostas kneeled beside Young, wiping away the blood-tinged spittle from his lips with a cloth. Sulu could see him already breathing easier. She held out the oxygen to Kostas.
“Thank you, Captain,” she said. She attached the mask around Young’s face and activated the canister. A digital display indicated its function. Kostas exchanged her medkit for her tricorder and monitored her patient. Sulu stayed with her. After a few minutes, the ensign said, “Hawk’s doing better.”
“Do you know Ensign Young?” Sulu asked, recognizing the familiarity in Kostas using an obvious nickname for Hawkins Young, though the captain herself had never heard it used aboard the ship. Then again, he’d only been a member of the crew for a relatively short time. “Do you know him well, I mean?”
“Not well,” Kostas said. “He was a year behind me at the Academy. We think we once had a class together, but we could never figure out if that was true. We both enjoy swimming, though, so we’ve seen each other a few times down at the ship’s natatorium.”
“What’s his condition?” Sulu asked. “Will he be all right?”
“For now,” Kostas said. “He’s suffering from pulmonary edema. I’ve administered a preload reducer to lower the pressure in his lungs, and the oxygen will help. I’ll need to keep an eye on him, and at some point, he might need assistance breathing. We can adapt an environmental suit, if necessary. Even though his condition is stable right now, the underlying cause has to be treated.”
“What is the underlying cause?”
“I can’t be sure, Captain, but I think the creature injected him with venom,” Kostas said. “I can treat Ensign Young, but I don’t have the training to develop an antivenin.”
“No, of course not, and nobody would expect you to be able to do that,” Sulu said. “But Doctor Morell leads an impressive medical staff aboard the Enterprise, and we now have a means of communicating with her, so she’ll be able to help.”
“Yes, sir,” Kostas said. “Thank you, sir.”
“I’m going to record a message for Commander Tenger,” the captain said. “I’ll append Ensign Young’s medical readings and any observations about his condition you want to add.”
“Yes, sir.”
Sulu found the padd where she’d dropped it to the deck, then made her way back to the forward console. Before she sat down, she put her hands on her hips and stared out at the barren alien landscape. She attempted to gather her thoughts, to consider all that she needed to tell Tenger. As she worked through the content she would include in her message, she noticed a shape outside, maybe eight or ten meters from the bow of the shuttlecraft. She thought it might be another life-form, and she leaned forward on the main console as she tried to make out any details.
She suddenly stood up straight and slammed her eyes closed. It didn’t matter. She knew what she’d seen, and she doubted that even time could ever cleanse her mind of the image: Xintal Linojj’s severed arm.