Doctor Uta Morell circled out from behind the desk in her office and accepted the padd from Malthus Dey, one of the medical technicians on her staff. “The results look promising,” Dey said with a smile. Morell appreciated the statement and the positive attitude—both especially meaningful coming from the crewman. An expert in toxicological preparation and testing, Dey offering his imprimatur on any prospective treatment usually heralded a high probability of success. For that reason, Enterprise’s chief medical officer had five years earlier lured Dey away from his position at the Central Hospital of Altair IV’s prestigious Toxin Assessment Wing. Her promise to him of an opportunity to encounter exotic and previously unknown poisons had not gone unfulfilled.
“That’s good to hear,” Morell said, gazing down at Dey. Though not particularly tall herself at one and five-eighths meters, she still towered over the Pygorian, who barely reached a meter in height. Average in size and coloring for his people, he had exceedingly fair skin, which lacked pigment, as did his eyes, though a small disk of dark hair crowned his head. “How close are we, do you think?” Morell asked.
“Very close, I believe,” Dey said. “The parameters you provided for the antivenin allowed me to use a formulation partially harvested from zabathu antibodies in response to the venom of a stinging centipede.”
“A zabathu?” Morell said, concerned. “That’s an Andorian animal, isn’t it?”
“Yes, and so is the stinging centipede,” Dey said. “And thanks to our three Andorian crew members, that’s why we have the zabathu antibodies in sickbay’s stores. Even though Ensign Young is human, the fraction of the antivenin that’s Andorian in origin is just enough to elicit an autonomic response in humans, but not enough to alter their biochemical balance.” He pointed to the padd he had handed to the doctor. “You’ll see.”
“My concern is that we’re trying to produce antivenin without having an actual sample of the venom it’s designed to counteract,” Morell said.
“I know,” Dey said. “It’s an unusual set of circumstances, but we do have the biosensor readings that Ensign Kostas provided to us, both of Ensign Young and of the animal that attacked him. We’re just fortunate that the human reaction to the venom mimicked that of the Andorian reaction to the stinging centipede.”
“If this works, Malthus, you’re going to make the medical literature again.”
“The preservation of Ensign Young’s life will be reward enough,” Dey said. “That wouldn’t even have been possible without the quick intervention of Ensign Kostas.”
“Galatea has done a noteworthy job,” Morell said, “not just in her initial reaction to Hawk’s distress, but in keeping him alive for the three days since.” The young engineer had taken some rudimentary medical classes at Starfleet Academy, and in her two years aboard Enterprise, she’d supplemented that education with regular training sessions in sickbay. That she had enough knowledge and skills to follow instructions well enough to manage Young’s pulmonary edema for seventy-two hours without being able to treat the underlying cause bespoke her abilities as a field medic. Among other difficult tasks, Kostas had been required at one point to perform a tracheotomy on the ailing ensign. “Thank you for this,” Morell said, holding up the padd. “I’ll take—” The doctor clipped her sentence short when she saw Nurse Veracruz appear in the open doorway. “Yes, Rosalinda?”
“Commander Linojj is asking to speak with you, Doctor,” the nurse said.
“All right, thank you,” Morell said. “Please tell her I’ll be right there.”
“Yes, Doctor.” The nurse withdrew.
“Malthus, would you please take this to Doctor Benzon,” Morell said, handing the padd back to Dey. “Ask him to begin reviewing the results and tell him that I’ll join him shortly.”
“Of course.” Dey took the padd, and Morell followed him out of her office. While the med tech headed left down the short corridor that connected to sickbay’s main ward, Morell went right, toward the surgical suite. She passed intensive care—mercifully empty at the moment—and entered recovery, where they’d kept Commander Linojj since operating on her residual arm.
“Good afternoon, Xintal,” Morell said, keeping her tone light and upbeat. The first officer had been understandably devastated to lose a limb, and indeed, the entire crew had reacted to the terrible incident with a collective sense of shock. But Doctor Benzon had begun counseling Linojj, which had already helped stabilize and improve her emotional state. The news that morning that preliminary tests graded the viability of fitting her with a biosynthetic arm as high had only advanced her progress.
In fact, the report of Linojj’s prospective limb replacement had bolstered the disposition of the whole crew. Three days earlier, when the first officer had suffered her injury and the captain and the two ensigns had vanished, the mood aboard Enterprise had sunk dramatically. Even though Sulu, Young, and Kostas remained separated from the ship, the reestablishment of contact with them had sown hopeful expectations for their eventual recovery.
“Thank you for coming so quickly, Doctor,” Linojj said. She sat propped up on a bio-bed, pillows behind her back and an active padd in her lap. She wore the powder-blue jumpsuit provided to patients, its right arm ending just past the shoulder, where the silver metal cuff protected Linojj’s compromised flesh and bone. “I wanted to talk to you about my progress.”
“All right,” Morell said, though she hesitated to say anything more than she’d already told the first officer. The doctor looked up at the diagnostic display above the head of the bio-bed and examined the readings shown there. “Your overall physical condition is good,” she said. “Your wound remains stable, and you know what this morning’s test showed: when we’ve finished preparing your biosynthetic arm, you should be able to undergo replacement surgery in short order. If successful, your recovery should take—”
“Doctor,” Linojj said, interrupting. “Excuse me, but we’ve gone over all of that. I wanted to talk to you about when I can be released from sickbay.”
“I see,” Morell said. “Xintal, I know you’d be more comfortable back in your own quarters, but since you won’t be doing much of anything anyway, it’s best to keep you here for the time being so that we can monitor your physical condition continuously.” The doctor did not reveal that she wanted Linojj under psychological observation as well.
“I’m not talking about going back to my cabin,” the first officer said. “I’m talking about returning to duty.”
“Oh,” Morell said, surprised. “Honestly, I hadn’t really anticipated you going back to active duty for some time.”
“Until after the replacement surgery,” Linojj said.
“But there’s no guarantee that the operation will succeed, is there?”
“No,” admitted Morell. “But as we learned this morning, the chances are very good.”
“And I’m happy about that,” Linojj said. “But what happens if I can’t have a biosynthetic replacement arm? What happens if my body rejects it, or I can’t make it work?”
“There are other types of prosthetics,” Morell said. “Not as sophisticated, but still useful.”
“Right,” Linojj said. “But my point is that why should I wait to see if I’ll be able to keep a biosynthetic arm, when I might not be able to. Fit me with something else for right now and let me go back on duty.” The first officer delivered her words with a commanding tone, as though issuing an order.
“I’m afraid it’s not that simple, Commander,” Morell said, resorting to a more formal demeanor to match Linojj’s own. “We have surgically repaired your residual limb in preparation of attaching a biosynthetic replacement. Providing you with a different arm in the interim would likely undermine that preparation. Additionally, even a less sophisticated prosthetic would require counseling and occupational therapy.”
“Then forget about a substitute limb,” Linojj said. She picked up the padd from her lap and tossed it onto a shelf by her bio-bed. “The captain has been away from the ship for three days now, and in her absence, my place is on the bridge.” She spoke quickly, her manner becoming agitated.
“When you’re injured, Commander, your place is in sickbay,” Morell said, “and right now, it’s my job to keep you here.”
“I don’t think so, Doctor.” Linojj swept the bedclothes away and swung her legs over the other side of the diagnostic pallet. When she did, she overbalanced and started to fall to her right; her shoulder moved, but with no arm on that side, she could not brace herself. Morell lunged awkwardly across the bio-bed and caught the first officer at the sides of her torso, keeping her upright.
Linojj yelled, not in pain, but in obvious frustration, pounding the pallet with her remaining fist.
“It’s all right,” Morell said gently. She came around to the other side of the bio-bed to face the first officer. The trident-shaped hollow in Linojj’s forehead flushed lavender, and tears spilled from her eyes. The doctor reached forward and took hold of her patient by the sides of her upper arms. “Everything’s going to be all right, Xintal,” she said quietly, her words barely more than a whisper.
Linojj let herself slip from the side of the bio-bed and into the doctor’s embrace. Morell stood a head shorter than the first officer, and yet Linojj felt small, almost insubstantial, in her arms. The doctor held her tightly as her body convulsed with her weeping.
Morell thought about the report she had yet to read on the antivenin Dey had prepared and tested. She knew that Benzon could ably handle the medical appraisal, though, and so she put it out of her mind. Instead, she would stay with Xintal Linojj for as long as the first officer needed her.
♦ ♦ ♦
The rocky plain stretched in one direction toward foothills that eventually escalated into mountains, but in another, it gave way to a dense forest. Sulu flew the shuttlecraft at a height of just fifty meters, alternately inspecting her scans of the surface and gazing through the forward port at the verdant expanse of tall leafy trees. By herself aboard Pytheas, she traveled with the autopilot engaged.
The captain had begun exploring the planet not long after reestablishing contact with Enterprise. While her crew studied the portal on Rejarris II, she sought to locate those who had created the device—who had done so presumably for the purpose of fleeing the asteroid that would ultimately drive their planet into an impact winter. The evidence of a ruined but empty world suggested that they had been successful in their escape. Even if they could not reverse the flow of travel through the portal, they might still provide enough information about the device to assist the Enterprise crew in doing so. Through two and a half days of searching, though, Sulu had yet to find any of those who had abandoned Rejarris II.
It’s not just that I haven’t seen any people, she thought. She also hadn’t seen any sign of their continued existence—or even of their past existence. She saw no settlements of any kind, and no indications that anybody had ever even traveled in the area.
That’s consistent with what we saw from orbit, Sulu thought. Or what we didn’t see. Although the captain had kept a keen eye on the planet surface during their search for Enterprise aboard Amundsen, she had seen no lights that could have corresponded to cities. As far as she could tell, the planet that she, Young, and Kostas had accidentally come to was as devoid of a population as Rejarris II.
Except that this place is alive. Where Rejarris II had been strangled by unbroken clouds and smothered in fields of ash, the world below sported open skies and clear ground, painted not in the grays of epic destruction, but in the greens of thriving flora. Sulu had also spotted fauna: birds flying above the trees, along with an occasional larger animal lumbering below breaks in the canopy, though she had seen nothing like the creature that had attacked Ensign Young.
The captain glanced at the chronometer and realized that she would need to turn back soon. She also saw her scheduled contact with Kostas about forty minutes away. Once they had regained contact with the Enterprise crew and Sulu had decided to scout the surrounding areas, she’d chosen not to remove Ensign Young from the destination point of the portal. Although Kostas had performed admirably in keeping him alive, he remained unconscious and in serious condition. It seemed obvious—and Doctor Morell had verified—that the instant the Enterprise medical staff completed production of an antivenin, it should be delivered through the portal and administered to Young.
Because Kostas needed to stay with her patient, the captain had ordered Tenger to dispatch a second shuttlecraft. On Sulu’s authority, Lieutenant Verant piloted Pytheas down to the surface of Rejarris II, but only to within five kilometers of the portal. After she programmed the autopilot to finish the shuttlecraft’s journey, Lieutenant Ved transported her back to Enterprise. Sulu and Kostas watched as Pytheas seemed to appear out of nowhere, at a distance from them of thirty meters, providing a margin of safety. Not very high above the ground, the shuttlecraft quickly descended and alit.
When Sulu took her excursions across the local region, she left Kostas aboard Amundsen to look after Young, but leaving the ensign behind served a second purpose. Not wanting to deplete Enterprise’s supply of log buoys and probes, the captain had ordered communications carried through the portal on padds, which did not have the capability of broadcasting over long distances. Remaining in place aboard Amundsen, the ensign could therefore transmit any messages from the ship directly to Sulu. Likewise, because she stayed in the line of sight of a probe hovering above the portal, Kostas could relay the captain’s responses back to Enterprise. Sulu had also implemented a policy that she would contact the ensign every two hours for a status report.
Down below, an orange glow bathed the wide span of the forest. Evening approached as the sun set. Sulu released the helm from autopilot and prepared to turn Pytheas around. As she did, though, she saw a wide break in the trees stretching across the path of her shuttlecraft. She checked the sensors, which revealed a river winding its way through the forest. Knowing that most populations that evolved on Class-M planets required fresh water for their survival, the captain decided to begin her eventual loop back to Kostas and Young aboard Amundsen by following the river, at least for a short while.
After Sulu settled the shuttlecraft onto its new heading and reinitiated the autopilot, she looked out at the water. It flowed placidly along, averaging seventy-five meters in width as it wended a path through the trees. Scans showed a diverse fishery, with at least a dozen different varieties. Animal life teemed in the forest along the banks. She saw something resembling a small bear ambling along in the shallows, as well as several four-legged creatures that resembled deer, but for their burgundy coloring.
Burgundy, Sulu thought with a grin. I would love a glass right about now. The last few days had been stressful, but her desire for red wine originated not from the need to calm herself, but from her connoisseurship of the grape. Her father had long ago introduced her to the world of fine wines, an appreciation she had subsequently cultivated. Serving aboard a starship that took her throughout the Federation and beyond—throughout the quadrant and beyond—offered her innumerable opportunities for new tastings, and the privileges of rank meant that she could keep a small stock of wines in her quarters aboard ship. Sulu did not collect wines, but acquired them to enjoy and share with friends. Her father might not have convinced her of the joy in most of his leisure pursuits, but he had certainly helped make her an oenophile.
Dad, she thought, wistful. She still missed him, and she knew she always would, but she felt grateful that she had spent so much time with him. Sulu had known her mother for only six years, but her father for three decades. She’d really gotten to know him, first from a child’s perspective, but then as an adult.
Although Dad always had the enthusiasm of a child, Sulu thought. She frequently teased him about the sheer volume of his interests, insisting to him that he changed avocations as often as most people changed clothes. He usually just smiled and quoted the writer Robert Heinlein: Specialization is for insects. She loved him for that, and for the fact that he didn’t so much take pride in his numerous and varied hobbies, but that he honestly and fully enjoyed them. He was, she supposed, a Renaissance man, given his interest and knowledge in so many diverse fields: botany, fencing, antique firearms, xenophilately, genealogy, archery, bibliophily—
In her peripheral vision, Sulu saw something that snapped her from her reverie. She looked off to port and saw a long, narrow break in the forest. She had flown over clearings during her recon, but the shape and size of the hole in the canopy seemed peculiar to her.
Once more, the captain took control of the shuttlecraft and altered course. She flew toward the area maintaining altitude and saw an area almost completely devoid of vegetation, though dead leaves covered some of it. On her second pass, she dropped to just above the treetops, which allowed her to distinguish a slope in the ground. Finally, after employing sensors to ensure that no large animals roamed near the area—and none of the spiderlike leviathans tunneled beneath it—she maneuvered Pytheas into the odd clearing and set down at one end.
Sulu checked the temperature, and though it had dropped a few degrees during her journey, she didn’t feel the need to don any outerwear. She did, however, arm herself with a phaser pistol, a tricorder, and a communicator. The chronometer told her that she still had twenty minutes before she would check in with Ensign Kostas, although the deepening shadows outside the shuttlecraft reminded her that she should already be heading back to her crew.
The captain exited Pytheas, making sure to close the hatch behind her. The slope she had seen from above started at the floor of the forest and angled downward. It had rounded sides and looked almost like a crater. Sulu walked beside it, measuring its length at fifty-six meters, and the depth at its farthest end at eight. Fallen leaves littered the bottom of the grade, but the soil along the sides appeared blackened. The trees that had once stood there lay toppled in the surrounding forest, some of them in fragments, and all of them similarly charred and aiming away from what must have been the point of impact.
When she gazed back toward the shuttlecraft, the view solidified her intuition that something had crashed to the ground there. Activating her tricorder, she scanned the depression that had been gouged out of the forest floor. The details that appeared on her display did not contradict her conclusion: the ground and trees had been burned, the soil along the bottom compacted by the high pressure of something that had collided with it at speed.
Sensors also showed a small piece of metal buried at the end of the trench. It too had been subjected to intense heat, but Sulu read refined duranium and tritanium among its components—advanced materials commonly used in the construction of starship hulls. Clearly a large vessel had not crashed there, but she thought it likely that something smaller had.
Something like a shuttlecraft, she thought. The idea sent chills through her. Something about the situation seemed wrong to her. No, not wrong, she thought. Oddly familiar.
Sulu walked back toward the shuttlecraft and the shallow end of the trench. She wanted to walk down into it and dig out the piece of metal that she had scanned, but the sun had eased lower in the sky, dimming visibility as dusk took firm hold of the land. She could no longer see the far end of the cavity that had been carved into the ground. She would have to return the next day.
Back aboard Pytheas, the captain recorded the planetary coordinates so that she could readily find the location again. She didn’t know if the crash site marked the path of those who had fled Rejarris II, but she would scour the surrounding area in the hopes of finding additional clues, or possibly even the people themselves.
Sulu set a course back to Ensign Kostas and Ensign Young aboard Amundsen. The shuttlecraft rose from the forest into a brilliant sky filled with the pinks and oranges of a dazzling sunset. Sulu took a moment to appreciate the beauty of the scene before heading back to the place that had become a temporary and unwelcome home.
♦ ♦ ♦
The doors whispered open before Tenger, and he strode through them into the engineering laboratory. The noise within struck him first; it filled the large compartment: the commingled voices of two dozen or more crew members, joined together with the chirps and tones of console feedback, the whine of tricorders, the hum of the transporter. Not quite a cacophony, it fell short, perhaps, in the organization of its individual sounds.
Platforms fronted by control stations lined each of the bulkheads, all of them utilized to design, analyze, and test components. Tenger saw pieces of equipment on almost all of them, with engineers laboring over various devices and a number of the ship’s scientists assisting. The commander recognized some of what he saw, but most of the components seemed outsized and, if not primitive, at least archaic.
Four square holographic stages sat in the middle of the lab, with operating panels on either side of the grouping. Tenger noted that the stages had been networked together, creating one large platform, which clearly had been done so that the combined unit could accommodate the huge structure currently projected atop it. The security chief studied the great cylindrical slice of equipment, clearly a cross section of the portal. Commander Buonarroti and one of his engineers, Lieutenant Warren Roscoe, stood before the impressive hologram, their heads together and their hands buried inside the glut of circuitry.
Tenger climbed the steps to the stage, then waited for an opportune moment to approach Enterprise’s chief engineer. He did not want to interrupt the analytical process. While Captain Sulu and Ensigns Kostas and Young appeared to face no immediate dangers—inside the shuttlecraft, they could readily escape the clutches of any other hostile beasts that attacked—Tenger did not wish to test the situation for long. He hoped to return them to the ship as quickly as possible.
When Buonarroti and Roscoe finally stepped back from the reproduced segment of the portal, the silver-haired lieutenant espied Tenger first. “Commander,” he said.
“Lieutenant,” Tenger said, and then, as Buonarroti turned to face him, “Commander. I wanted to check on your progress.”
“I’m not really sure we can call it progress just yet,” Buonarroti said.
Tenger felt his brow knit together. “Are you finding equipment that you don’t understand?” he asked.
“No, it’s not that,” Buonarroti said. “Everything we’ve seen so far corresponds to the level of technology that the landing parties encountered on Rejarris Two, and so it all falls well within our understanding. The difficulty is that we still haven’t discovered how all of this—” He gestured toward the holographic cross section of the portal. “—accomplishes what it does. The answer must be in there somewhere, but the structure is just so big, and there’s no one component or set of components that stands out from the rest.”
“We’ve scanned the entire length of the torus-shaped structure that forms the framework of the portal, and we’ve found virtually no empty space,” Roscoe added. “That means we’re researching more than two hundred fifty thousand cubic meters of equipment.”
“Can it be done?” Tenger wanted to know.
“I’m confident that it can be done, and I’m confident that we can do it,” Buonarroti said. “I just haven’t developed a feeling yet for how long it’s going to take us to understand how the portal functions, or how long it will take us to reverse its flow—if that’s even possible.”
“And what if it’s not?” Tenger asked.
“Once we know how the portal works,” Buonarroti said, “we may be able to construct a smaller version of it and deliver it to Captain Sulu.”
“Calibrating it could be problematic, though,” Roscoe said. “In addition to needing to figure out how the structure creates a pathway from origin to destination, it’s also unclear how it’s set for that destination. We’re not even sure if it’s creating a passage through space or time or both. It might even be linking a point in our universe to a point in another.”
The chief engineer nodded as if in agreement, but then said, “All of that’s true, but no matter how the portal functions and where it sends people, if it’s been done once, it can be done again.”
“But you can’t estimate the length of time it will take to do it?” Tenger asked.
“We might find the answer in an hour, or in a week, or in a month,” Buonarroti said. “But the more work we do, the more we study the portal, the better able we’ll be to evaluate how long it will take us to understand it and retrieve the landing party.”
The chief engineer’s response, while understandable, did not satisfy Tenger. To Roscoe, he said, “Carry on, Lieutenant.” The engineer started, evidently not expecting to be dismissed at that moment. He recovered quickly, though, and moved back to the holographic copy of the portal segment.
Tenger descended from the platform, with Buonarroti following behind him. When they had moved far enough away from everybody else in the lab to afford them some degree of privacy, the security chief and acting captain stopped. “Commander,” he said quietly, “I know that this is a difficult task, not only to achieve the return of the captain and the others, but to approximate how long it will take to do that. What I need to know from you right now is whether I should contact Starfleet Command. Do we need the assistance of other starship crews? Do we need to bring in the Starfleet Corps of Engineers?”
“This is taking longer than any of us want it to, and it’s frustrating that we can’t know just yet the amount of time we’ll need to get this done,” Buonarroti said. “I could guess, but that wouldn’t serve any of us.” He leaned in closer and spoke even more quietly. “Tenger,” he said, clearly intending to emphasize his words by using the security chief’s name, “if you’re asking my opinion, it seems like a very bad idea to call out the cavalry so close to Tzenkethi space. We’re far enough away that the Enterprise went unnoticed, or if not unnoticed, then it didn’t raise enough of an alarm within the Coalition for them to send one of their ships after us. But if other Starfleet vessels descend on the same solar system so near their borders, you can believe that they’d take an interest—not just in us, but in whatever it is that’s brought us here.”
“Meaning the portal.”
“You know how belligerent the Tzenkethi can be,” Buonarroti said. “They might well view the portal as a dangerous technology, one that Starfleet is attempting to exploit and weaponize.”
“Yes,” Tenger said, recognizing the truth of the chief engineer’s words. The territorial and distrustful Tzenkethi might imagine the Federation creating a portal that opened directly into Coalition space, and then sending a squadron of Starfleet vessels through to attack. If positioned out in space, even an Excelsior-class starship like Enterprise could easily fit through the portal. “Yes, you’re right, of course,” Tenger said. “I’m just concerned about Captain Sulu, Ensign Kostas, and Ensign Young.”
“We all are,” Buonarroti said. He glanced back over his shoulder in the direction of the holographic stage, then back at Tenger. “We’re all working as diligently as possible to accomplish this, and I know that you know that. I promise you that if we get to a point where the process is taking too long and I can’t tell you how much more time we’re going to need, or if I determine that our efforts will be measured in months or years rather than in days or weeks, I’ll let you know at once.”
“Thank you, Rafe,” Tenger said, using Buonarroti’s nickname among his friends, pronouncing it Rah-fee. “When you have—”
“Commander Tenger,” a voice suddenly called out. The security chief looked around to see Lieutenant Commander Fenn staring over at him with both eyes. The intensity of her gaze and the tension in her body language conveyed a sense of exigency. Tenger quickly headed in her direction, with Buonarroti at his side.
“What is it, Commander?” Tenger asked when he reached Fenn. The science officer stood before a testing platform, upon which sat a metal plate filled with a patchwork of rudimentary solid-state circuits. The console before it contained four displays, three of the screens stacked beside a larger one. They each presented a distinct view of a section of the portal. The trio of smaller displays showed, from top to bottom, a panel that looked to Tenger like a solar cell, an emitter node, and the area of the structure that had been compromised, possibly by weapons fire. The fourth screen held an image of an entire arc of the portal that included the two Enterprise shuttlecraft beside it. As Tenger watched the larger display, it jumped.
“Did you see that, sir?” Fenn asked, her agitation plain. She peered at Tenger with only one of her eyes, while the other observed the console.
“Do you mean the flicker?” Tenger asked. “I’m sure Commander Buonarroti can have one of his engineers replace a faulty display.”
“Commander, the display isn’t failing,” Fenn said. “I’ve run two diagnostics on it.”
Tenger glanced at the other displays just as the larger one blinked again. “I think there might be something wrong with your diagnostics, Commander.”
“Sir, these—” Fenn pointed to the three smaller screens. “—are exhibiting still images of the portal recorded by our probe, but this—” She indicated the large monitor. “—is a live feed.”
Tenger watched the display again. Nothing happened for a full minute, and then another, but finally the image once more jumped, and he saw something he hadn’t before: the structure of the portal remained precisely the same, but the two shuttlecraft vanished. So too did the rocky plain inside the framework, replaced by the same grayish white expanse that stretched away outside the framework. After just an instant, though, the image reverted to its previous state.
“What’s going on?” Tenger asked. “If it’s not an error in the display, could it be a problem with the probe or the transmission signal?”
“Lieutenant Rainbow Sky ran a diagnostic on the probe, and Commander Kanchumurthi verified that its transmission signal is strong and shows no signs of interference,” Fenn said.
“Then what is the explanation?” Tenger asked.
“The portal is failing.”
The impact on Tenger would not have been greater if the science officer had drawn a phaser and stunned him with it. “What?”
“When the portal is functioning as designed, we can see within it the destination to which things can travel through it,” Fenn explained, “but when it’s not, we see the surface of Rejarris Two.”
“It’s the power,” Buonarroti said, speaking as though coming out of a daze himself.
“Yes,” Fenn agreed. “I think so.”
“The portal uses solar cells as its primary power source,” Buonarroti said. “With the extreme cloud cover surrounding the planet, though, those cells run at a significantly reduced rate. In passing objects through it and generating tractor beams, it might have overextended the current capacity of its solar energy collection.”
“What will happen if it loses power completely?” Tenger asked, already knowing the answer.
“We’ll lose the ability to see the two shuttlecraft and Captain Sulu and the others,” Buonarroti said, “and to communicate with them.”
“We won’t be able to send anything through the portal to them,” Fenn said. Tenger understood the terrible repercussions of such a situation.
“Can we do something about it?” he asked. “Can we provide it a different power source?”
“Maybe, but it would likely require several days,” Buonarroti said.
“We probably wouldn’t be able to replace the power source before the portal shuts down completely,” Fenn said.
Even though the recovery of the Enterprise landing party remained the top priority and ultimate goal of the present operation, another situation required more immediate attention. The security chief found the intercom on Fenn’s console and activated it. “Tenger to sickbay.”
“Sickbay here,” came the response. “This is Doctor Morell.”
“Doctor, what is the status of the medication you’re preparing for Ensign Young?”
“We’ve tested several different antivenins and have seen good results,” Morell said. “We’re confident of one particular formulation, but because of the circumstances, where the medication will be administered away from sickbay, with no provisions for anybody other than a medic to treat the ensign should he respond badly, we’re continuing to refine it. We should have it within the next twelve to twenty-four hours.”
“It might not be possible to deliver the medicine to Ensign Young at that time,” Tenger said. “Which would be medically more advisable, to give him what you’ve prepared right now, or to give him nothing more for several days?”
Morell did not reply right away. As the silence extended, Tenger fought his inclination to urge her for an answer. She knew her job, and he allowed her the time she needed—though he had no way of knowing exactly how much time they had left before such a decision would be rendered meaningless. Finally, she said, “I cannot fully warrant the effectiveness or even the safety of the antivenin at this point, but failing to treat Ensign Young for several days will probably result in his death.”
“Prepare the medication for delivery through the portal at once,” Tenger ordered. “Report to the transporter room with it as soon as you’re ready.”
“Understood,” Morell said. “I’ll be there in five minutes.”
Tenger tapped the channel closed. “Keep me informed,” he said to Buonarroti and Fenn. “Both of you.” Then he exited the engineering lab, on his way to meet the chief medical officer in the transporter room in an attempt to save Hawkins Young before it was too late.
♦ ♦ ♦
Sulu stood at the front of Amundsen’s cabin, staring through the viewport, waiting. Behind her, Ensign Kostas cared for Ensign Young, whose condition had worsened. His breathing had grown more labored, the already rough sound of his respiration through the tracheostomy tube becoming shallower and more erratic.
The captain glanced at the padd in her hand and set it down on the main console. A patch of brown dirt clung to one corner, doubtless where it had fallen to the ground. Just moments earlier, an alert had told them that sensors detected a padd dropped through the portal by the Enterprise crew. The captain had retrieved it and brought it back aboard the shuttlecraft, where she’d listened to the single message recorded onto it.
“Captain, this is Tenger,” the security chief had said, and Sulu could tell that the normal tension with which he conducted his duties had increased dramatically. “Our view of the two shuttlecraft through the portal has become intermittent. Scans show that the portal is losing power, likely because it employs solar cells, which have been adversely effected by the continuous cloud cover. As a result, it is possible that the portal will lose power completely, meaning that we will lose our ability to communicate with the landing party.”
And also making our return a virtual impossibility, Sulu had thought.
“Commander Buonarroti believes that he and his engineers will be able to restore power to the portal,” Tenger had continued, “though because we are still studying how it functions, he isn’t sure how long that will take. Because we might be out of touch with the landing party for several days, we are immediately loading a log buoy with the antivenin for Ensign Young. Doctor Morell wanted to do more testing, but she would prefer that the medication be administered to the ensign sooner rather than later.”
Via messages scrolling across a padd on top of Amundsen, Sulu and Kostas had kept the chief medical officer apprised of Young’s condition. The captain understood that, because neither Morell nor any of the doctors on her staff would be able to monitor in person the ensign’s reaction to the antivenin, she would want to test the treatment as thoroughly as possible beforehand. It seemed the right choice, though, not to risk waiting days to deliver the medicine.
“It is unclear how soon the portal will lose all power,” Tenger had said. “For that reason, we will not launch the log buoy, but will transport it to a point above you, as we’ve done with the padds. The buoy will be under power, though, and will descend through the portal and land beside you. We will continue to deliver our regular status reports to you every two hours for as long as we can. If the portal does shut down, we will contact you immediately once it is functioning again.” The security chief paused, and Sulu thought that he might include a personal note—Good luck, or something of that nature—but he simply said, “Tenger out.”
As Sulu watched the sky through the forward port, she wondered how the chief engineer intended to restore power to the portal. She’d had her own ideas about that, and so she’d recorded a message back to the ship, which she’d delivered by way of a scrolling padd. She feared that modifying the portal to utilize a different power source could alter its function, thus permanently separating the landing party from the Enterprise crew—and home.
Thirty meters ahead of Amundsen, three dark points suddenly appeared in midair. They descended and lengthened, as though growing out of nothing. Sulu recognized them as the landing legs of a log buoy. The drumlike main body appeared next, but then suddenly the device plummeted, clearly no longer under power. It canted as it fell. One leg struck the side of a boulder and collapsed inward. The buoy crashed against the hard stone, then tumbled to the ground and onto its side.
Sulu understood at once what had happened. The portal had obviously lost power just as the buoy moved through the transitional plain between Rejarris II and the unnamed world on which the captain and her two crew members found themselves. With the portal no longer functioning, the rest of the buoy could not complete the journey. No longer whole, the part of the device that had come through failed; unable to fly, it plunged to the ground.
The captain reached to the sensor panel and scanned the wreckage. Depending on how the buoy had been compromised, it could pose a danger, either through the release of radiation or the explosion of its power system—if, for example, the coolant system remained on Rejarris II. Fortunately, Sulu read no such issues, nor did she detect any life-forms nearby, above or below the surface.
Moving to the hatch, the captain told Ensign Kostas, “The buoy is here. I’m going to retrieve the antivenin.” She could only hope that the medication had not only made it through the portal, but that it had survived the crash intact. Carrying a phaser and a communicator with her, she exited Amundsen.
Sulu studied the buoy as she approached it. The device looked to her like a wounded animal: its leg bent, its metal casing dented in numerous places, the fractional portion of its main drum looking as though its upper section had been sliced off cleanly by an impossibly sharp blade. It made her think of the terrible ordeal that Linojj had endured.
Sulu looked in the direction of the spot where Ensign Young had first fallen. Linojj’s arm no longer lay there on the ground, a grotesque, lifeless monument to the first officer’s traumatic injury. The captain had collected the severed limb and placed it in a secure specimen container, which she’d then stowed in the equipment storage area aboard Amundsen. Although the arm would be of no use to Linojj, it seemed wrong to Sulu to leave a part of her friend to rot on the soil of some distant, unknown world.
At the buoy, the captain examined the two small panels that allowed access to a pair of storage compartments. Located at the bottom of the main body, the hinged doors—and presumably the spaces beyond—had passed in their entirety through the portal. Sulu tapped at the control padd beside one of the panels, but nothing happened. The buoy had lost power.
The captain lowered herself to the ground, flipped over onto her back, and slid in among the legs of the buoy. She located the manual release for one of the doors and pulled the inset handle. The panel popped open with an audible click. When she extricated herself from the buoy’s legs and checked the storage compartment, though, she found it empty.
The manual release for the second access panel proved more difficult. Sulu didn’t know if its mechanism had been damaged in the crash, or the door wedged shut, but she ended up having to force the handle with a well-chosen rock. When she opened the compartment, a clear, yellow-tinted liquid spilled out.
Bitter disappointment clutched at Sulu, who understood the implications for Ensign Young. When she looked inside the storage compartment, though, she saw not only the pieces of a broken container, but a second, intact ampoule, as well as another padd. She reached in and grabbed both items, then read the small label affixed to the vial: ENSIGN HAWKINS YOUNG; ANTIVENIN FOR VENOM OF UNKNOWN ANIMAL. A list followed of the chemicals utilized in creating the serum. When Sulu checked the padd, she saw a single entry recorded on it.
Back in the shuttlecraft, the captain handed the vial of antivenin to Kostas, and then the padd. “It contains a message to you from Doctor Morell,” she said. Sulu assumed her chief medical officer had instructions for Kostas about treating Young.
While the ensign listened to the message and then apparently read through some written material appended to it, Sulu waited, pondering what she should do next. For the moment, she would assume that Buonarroti and Enterprise’s engineers would be able to reactivate the portal. That might not come to pass, but she could deal with that if and when the time came. In the meanwhile, she needed to be prepared once Tenger reestablished contact with her.
“I’m ready, Captain,” Kostas said. Sulu watched as the ensign pulled her medkit from beneath the antigrav stretcher. She extracted a hypospray, inserted the ampoule into it, then—after hesitating for just a moment—injected the antivenin into the front of Young’s shoulder.
Sulu didn’t notice any immediate difference in the wounded ensign’s respiration, but Kostas picked up a tricorder and scanned her patient. “There’s already a small improvement in his lungs,” she said. “Since the edema has lasted as long as it has, it may take some time to clear up.”
“Well done, Ensign,” Sulu said.
“Thank you, sir, but I’ll need to keep Ensign Young under observation,” Kostas said. “It’s important to ensure that the venom is completely counteracted, and that he suffers no side effects from the medication. Doctor Morell issued instructions about what to watch for, as well as about prospective treatments.”
“Good,” the captain said. “The portal has lost power, and so for the time being, we’re out of touch with the Enterprise.”
Kostas nodded and glanced nervously at Young, but then she recovered enough to conceal her obvious anxiety. “So then what do we do now?” she asked.
“That’s a good question, Ensign,” Sulu said. At the moment, the captain could think of only one thing to do next, which troubled her. As a starship captain, as a leader of more than seven hundred crew members, often in dangerous situations, she liked to have options. Facing circumstances that allowed for just a single reasonable course of action could be liberating in a way—it removed the responsibility of having to weigh various possibilities and make a choice among them—but Sulu thought that it more often than not meant that she had failed to consider every aspect of a situation. “For now, I’m going to continue what I’ve been doing: searching for the people who constructed the portal. When Ensign Young recovers, you and he can join me.”
“What if we can’t find them?”
“From all we can tell, the inhabitants of Rejarris Two successfully escaped a catastrophic asteroid strike on their world,” Sulu said. “They did not have warp capability, but they had to have gone somewhere. The portal seems their likeliest salvation. And remember, I did find evidence today of somebody having visited this planet.”
“But that was just one small crash site,” Kostas said. “What if that’s not evidence of the people who built the portal? Or even it if is, what if we can’t find them? What if those who escaped through the portal intentionally changed its destination after passing through it? Or what if its settings changed over time?”
“Those are all possibilities, Ensign,” Sulu admitted. “But while it’s important to be prepared for different eventualities, it’s a mistake to concentrate on the pessimistic view. We have to figure out what will provide us the best chance of returning to the Enterprise, and then work to make that happen.”
“Yes, sir,” Kostas said, lowering her head.
Sulu offered the engineer a tight-lipped smile. “It’s all right, Ensign,” she said. “Look after your patient. I’m going to chart search routes for us.”
As Kostas took additional tricorder readings of Young, the captain walked back to Amundsen’s main console. She downloaded the navigational logs of Pytheas to Amundsen before beginning to plan the route they would take across the planet. She would first revisit the site of the apparent crash, then continue in that general direction.
In the back of her mind, though, she asked herself all of the questions that Kostas had, and more.
♦ ♦ ♦
Rafaele Buonarroti wanted to throw something. More than that, he felt the urge to race from the engineering lab to the transporter room, beam down to Rejarris II, and level a phaser at the portal. The device should not have been so complicated.
Except it’s not that complicated, is it? he asked himself. And that’s part of the problem. A device constructed with a greater degree of technological sophistication would have been easier to understand, and easier to modify. The sciences team still hadn’t determined just how the portal managed to create a link between two noncontiguous points, or even whether those two points were separated by space, time, or both—or whether they even existed within the same universe.
For his part, Buonarroti had surrendered the task of figuring out how to reverse the flow of the portal, in favor of working to reenergize it. It had taken more than a day to realize that the singular integration of the solar cells might point to the lack of a backup power source, and it had required another day to examine the massive structure and confirm that. Forty-eight hours after losing contact with Captain Sulu and the landing party, they had made no progress.
Having found no external interfaces, Buonarroti and his staff had spent two more days searching for a place they could adapt to a secondary power supply. They identified half a dozen such points, but every model they ran resulted in energy streaming unevenly through the portal, leading to overloaded circuitry and damaged components. Eventually, they realized they had to abandon the approach.
The chief engineer had then conceived of finding a solution by introducing secondary power at multiple points, rather than at just one, thereby balancing the flow. The Enterprise engineers spent another day programming and executing such simulations. They all finished with the device actually exploding.
Five days, Buonarroti thought. Five days and we’re nowhere. He understood, of course, that every step they took, even false steps, helped bring them closer to their ultimate goal. But he also understood that, with each day that passed, Captain Sulu, Ensign Kostas, and Ensign Young faced potential dangers on an unexplored world.
“Commander?”
Buonarroti looked up from his console, on which the outcome of his latest simulation had just completed unsuccessfully. Science Officer Fenn stood beside him. “What can I do for you, Borona?”
Fenn’s head jerked back a couple of centimeters, as though she’d been slapped. Buonarroti realized his mistake, addressing her by her given name while on duty. Though he never minded such familiarity, even in a professional setting, and he didn’t think Fenn did either, the captain’s formal demeanor had, of necessity, influenced the entire crew.
“Sorry, I’m just tired,” he said. “How can I help you, Commander?”
“I’m hoping that I can actually help you,” Fenn said. “We haven’t quite figured out the physics of it yet, but we’ve at least determined how the portal creates a link between two points.”
“Without the underlying physics, I’m not sure how much that helps,” Buonarroti said.
“Allow me to show you,” Fenn said. She held out her hand and opened it, revealing a data card. Buonarroti took it and reached to insert it in an input slot on his console.
“What is it?” he asked, even as a schematic of the portal appeared on his display.
“These are readings the probe gathered while the structure was in operation,” Fenn said. She leaned in and, at the four compass points, touched the circle representing the portal. Five-pointed stars blinked onto the screen, each of them colored yellow. “These are field generators,” she said.
“What type of field?” Buonarroti asked.
“That’s the surprise: the generators produce subspace fields,” Fenn said.
“Subspace?” Buonarroti asked. “I thought the population on Rejarris Two wasn’t that advanced.”
“We didn’t think they were,” Fenn said. “The generators are very rudimentary, though, and it might be that they developed them while working to produce the portal.” Fenn double-tapped at the screen with all of her fingers, then made a twisting motion. The four stars representing field generators duplicated and moved into new positions around the circle of the portal. Fenn did it a second time, copying the eight stars and making them into sixteen. “These are all the generators in the structure,” she said. “Together, they somehow create the extra-dimensional path away from Rejarris Two. What’s particularly important is that the number, intensity, and relative positioning appear to be critical to forming the pathway, but there are no variables controlling the point in space and time to which the portal links.”
“That sounds like it might not be possible to reverse the flow,” Buonarroti noted, the information more than a little disappointing.
“It means that the people who built it couldn’t do it, or at least didn’t do it,” Fenn said. “It doesn’t mean that we can’t do it. But it does mean that maybe Captain Sulu’s solution to reenergize the portal might be the right one.”
Just before contact had been lost with the landing party, the captain’s last message had been to suggest a means of powering the portal again: by reestablishing it in orbit about Rejarris II. The structure contained both antigravs and thrusters, indications that it had been designed for space. Additionally, the trail of particles they had detected in orbit had led them directly to the portal in the first place.
“I’m sure we could maneuver the structure back into orbit,” Buonarroti said, “but I was reluctant to do that because, without knowing how it works, it could alter its settings and therefore its destination.”
“But now we know that the pathway, at least with how the portal is presently configured, is static,” Fenn said. “If we haul it back into space, the destination will move into space above the planet on the other side.”
“Captain Sulu’s reasoning was sound,” Buonarroti said. “By taking the portal back into orbit, above the cloud cover, we provide it with its original power source: the sun. We wouldn’t have to alter the device, and therefore wouldn’t risk disrupting the way it functions.”
“It might seem like an audacious plan,” Fenn said, “but I think it’s the one with the best chance of succeeding.”
“I think you might be right,” Buonarroti said, but something else troubled him. “But all we’re talking about is restoring power to the portal so that we can reestablish contact with Captain Sulu’s landing party. We’re still not addressing how to bring the captain and the others back.”
“No,” Fenn agreed, “but the captain’s last message also told us that she intended to keep searching for those who actually constructed the portal. If she can find them, and if they can help us modify the device, then being in contact with the landing party could be critical.”
“I heard too many ifs in that sentence for my liking,” Buonarroti said. He pressed a control and Fenn’s data card slid out of the input slot. He took it and stood up. “Come on,” he told the science officer.
“Where are we going?” Fenn asked.
“To make our case to Commander Tenger.”
♦ ♦ ♦
Sulu lay on the deck of Amundsen in a bedroll, trying to rest but failing miserably. She had trouble shutting her mind down. Bad enough that she had been involuntarily flung through the universe to a place she didn’t know, and from which she might never return, but the responsibility of having two of her crew marooned with her exacerbated the situation. She felt sad and lost, and she knew from experience that hopelessness lurked somewhere close.
Five days, she thought. It’s been five days. She knew that the Enterprise crew hadn’t abandoned their attempts to power up the portal, to reinstitute communications with the landing party, and ultimately to rescue them. Still, even though the captain knew such efforts would require time, she had to admit to herself that she’d expected to hear something from Tenger by that point.
Sulu raised her head to glance over at Ensign Young. He sat with his feet dangling over the edge of the antigrav stretcher, a padd in his lap. His attention had wandered from whatever he’d been reading, though, and he stared over at the captain. He reached up and covered the end of the tracheostomy tube protruding from his neck. “Are you all right, sir?” he asked. His voice sounded rough and weak.
Sulu pushed herself up to her knees. “I’m fine, Ensign,” she said. “How are you feeling?” Young’s recovery had initially been slow, his edema easing but not abating during the first three days after Kostas had administered the antivenin. At last, though, on the fourth day, his condition had shown significant improvement, his breathing finally returning close to normal. And today he was actually able to rise and move about the cabin, Sulu thought. And his color’s back. Until that day, his skin had displayed a sickly pallor.
“I’m improving,” Young said. “And I’ll be happy when I can remove this thing.” He pointed to the tracheostomy tube, a smaller version than the one Kostas had initially inserted into his neck. The young engineer had so far demonstrated proficient skills as a medic, but still preferred to wait until they got back to Enterprise so that Doctor Morell could do the final removal.
“It’ll come out soon enough,” Sulu told him. “In the meantime, don’t strain yourself. Save your voice.”
Young nodded as Sulu stood up and moved to the front of the cabin, where she took a seat beside Kostas. “Couldn’t sleep, sir?” the ensign asked.
“No,” Sulu said. “I guess I’m not used to having so much time off.”
Kostas chuckled. Since losing contact with the Enterprise crew, the captain and her two crew members had spent the intervening five days searching the surface of the planet on which they found themselves. They first stopped at the break in the forest Sulu had found, where they’d managed to excavate the small piece of metal her tricorder had found. Not even as large as a human fingertip, the nodule looked like nothing of any particular note. Scored black, with a rough patch where it might once have attached to another piece of metal, it could have come from the hull of a spacecraft, as the tritanium and duranium within it suggested, but it might also have been a part of an aircraft fuselage or even something else entirely.
Since then, Sulu and Kostas had been taking shifts at the helm, tracing the search pattern that the captain had devised. At first, they had followed grids in a spiral centered at the portal’s destination point, where they had left Pytheas. In that way, they stayed close enough to the area that they could return there in relatively short order should they receive a transmission from Enterprise. After three days, though, the captain had chosen to fly farther afield, concerning herself more with finding those who had created the portal than reestablishing contact with her crew.
Sulu gazed through the viewport. A rolling grassland passed beneath the shuttlecraft, its gentle rises and mild falls putting the captain in mind of a rolling green ocean. A small herd of four-legged animals roamed atop the next hill, but Sulu saw no signs of civilization—no cities, no towns, no primitive settlements.
And then she heard the sensor panel emit a three-toned signal. She and Kostas had programmed alerts to sound if scans detected signs of intelligent life: controlled power, road systems, manufactured structures, and the like. The ensign read from her display. “Sensors are showing refined metal,” she said.
“Are there any life signs?” Sulu asked.
“No,” Kostas said, skillfully working her panel. “But I’m seeing tritanium . . . duranium . . . rodinium—”
“All materials commonly used in constructing starship hulls,” Sulu said. “Where is it?”
“Bearing three hundred thirty-five degrees,” Kostas said. Sulu operated the helm and brought Amundsen to port. When she had straightened the shuttlecraft’s course, she looked out, eager to see what they had found. One hill drifted below, and then another. Eventually, Kostas said, “Range: one hundred thirty meters.” She pointed ahead of them. “It’s just over the second rise.”
The land flowed and ebbed and then flowed again. Sulu watched as the land fell away once more after that to reveal not merely a valley beyond it, but a midsize crater, several dozen meters across. In the middle of the sinuous prairie, among tall grasses waving gracefully in the wind, a circular hole had been gouged from the earth, the soil within it charred and left devoid of life.
There could be no doubt of the cause. Wreckage littered the crater. Whatever had crashed there had been reduced to fragments. No one could have survived.
“Was it a ship?” Kostas asked.
“I don’t know,” Sulu said. “Maybe a small one.” And she thought: Like a shuttlecraft.
“Did it belong to the inhabitants of Rejarris Two?” Kostas asked. “The ones who built the portal?”
“I don’t know,” Sulu said again. “Maybe.” The idea filled the captain with melancholy, but at the same time, if it had been a vessel manned by Rejarris II natives, then it could mean that Sulu and Kostas and Young had a good chance of finding others. After all, an entire planetary population had gone missing, and not just the complement of a single small ship. “We need to find out.”
Sulu changed course and started Amundsen on a descent into the crater. As the shuttlecraft slipped down past the rim, the nature of what had taken place there became even clearer. The ground appeared blackened and sterile, and no part of the vessel had survived intact.
As Sulu set Amundsen down, Kostas moved to the aft bulkhead. She returned with two phasers, tricorders, and communicators. The captain instructed her to leave a communicator with Ensign Young as well, so that he wouldn’t have to cross to the front of the cabin if he needed to contact Sulu and Kostas. “We’ll check in every fifteen minutes,” Sulu told Young. She didn’t bother to give him instructions on what to do if they failed to keep in communication with him, because what could he do?
Outside, Sulu closed the hatch and paced slowly to the center of the crater. Fragments of metal lay all around, most no larger than a fingernail. She scanned the area with her tricorder and saw that some of the debris had been driven deep into the ground.
“There are a few larger pieces,” Kostas said, consulting her own tricorder. The ensign walked a short distance away while Sulu dropped onto her haunches. The captain picked up a small piece of metal and held it in her palm. She did not want to imagine the incredible force required to tear the vessel apart so thoroughly, nor what such a force would have done to anybody inside it.
Sulu scanned several bits of metal, confirming the readings Ensign Kostas had taken aboard the shuttlecraft. She stowed several of the fragments in a small compartment in her tricorder, then stood back up. She looked over at Kostas and saw her agape. The ensign stood motionless, her gaze glued to a larger section of metal that she held in one hand. It had ragged edges and was as large as her forearm.
“Ensign, what is it?” Sulu asked, walking over to her. “Have you found something?” By way of explanation, Kostas handed the metal piece to the captain. Sulu looked at it and saw its scorched gray-white surface adorned with a single word in Federation Standard, the name of a Starfleet vessel she recognized.
It was Excelsior.