The turbolift doors glided open, and even before she stepped out of the cab and onto the bridge, Xintal Linojj felt all eyes turn toward her. You’re imagining it, she told herself—but of course she wasn’t. Some of the crew looked up and saw her, then quickly cast their attention back to their consoles. Others kept right on looking, while still others glanced up furtively.
Linojj left the turbolift without hesitating. She’d learned a long time ago not to delay even a single step when you knew the course you needed to travel, no matter how long that course, no matter how difficult or frightening, no matter the obstacles that stood in your way. The Romulans had invaded her homeworld of Cort during her youth, and they’d stayed for nearly a decade before the Boslic had finally been able to drive them out for good. As a girl, she saw less than most, protected by her family as much as possible from the effects of the attempted Romulan conquest, but as time passed, Linojj discovered for herself the awful truth. Once she had, she rebelled however she could against the intruders, most often in subtle, personal ways that some might refuse to label rebellion at all. At the height of hostilities, when the Empire occupied her hometown, she abstained from eating all of the rations provided her, so that she and her family could subsist on what she saved should the Romulans later deny them sustenance. She refused to learn any words in the Romulan language, and thus never understood when one overseer or another ordered her to do something. She never slept at lights-out, but stayed awake into the night, planning her life free of the Empire. It had been then that she had first contemplated leaving Cort, not to abandon her people, but to find a means of protecting them, and those like them.
Linojj had been thinking about eventually joining the Boslic Interstellar Force on the day that she’d come home from school to find her mother bound in the kitchen, her arms and legs tied to a chair. Only twelve, Xintal Linojj stood and stared while the loud, clumsy sounds of an unfamiliar man emerged from the refresher. Her mother told her to run out, quickly, to meet Bornya, her older sister, on the way home from school and go with her to a friend’s house.
But Linojj hadn’t moved. She froze, knowing that the man in the ’fresher wasn’t her father, who at that time of day would be in the mines, unearthing the cormaline the Empire so desperately sought. More than that, she knew that the stranger must be a Romulan, that no Boslic would commit such an act. In hushed, hurried tones, her mother begged Xintal to find Bornya, and for the two of them to stay away from the house.
And still Linojj hadn’t moved, not until the man had come out of the ’fresher and seen her. She bolted then, dropping her textbooks and racing for the front door. She never made it.
The rest of that day had been a blur. The man—a Romulan who reeked of alcohol—locked her in the cellar. She yelled for a long time to be let out, and wept uncontrollably when she heard her sister’s voice—and screams—through the door. Her father found Xintal that night at the base of the cellar stairs, hugging herself tightly and whimpering.
Her mother and sister had survived their ordeal, and once the Boslic had finally repelled the Romulan forces for good, the two had even found a measure of peace in their lives. As far as Linojj knew, her sister never spoke of that day, and her mother did only once, years after the fact, when Xintal, as an adult, attempted to apologize for her failure to immediately do as she’d been told. “You only reacted to the situation the way that any twelve-year-old might.” Her mother, she knew, intended to exonerate her of her guilt, but the word might haunted Linojj, for she might have run away at once, saving at least her sister from a terrible wrong.
Never hesitate when you know what you need to do, she told herself as she made her way toward the command chair. She’d absorbed that lesson many times over, thanks to the Romulans, but never more so than on that day when she hadn’t prevented her sister from coming home. Linojj had suffered far worse indignities than parading wounded and incomplete before people she had known and worked with for years—and in some instances, for more than a decade. These are my crewmates, she thought as Tenger stood up to face her. In many cases, they were also her friends. It didn’t matter whether they looked at her and her missing right arm with sorrow or even pity; she knew that, no matter what they felt, they supported her.
“Commander Linojj, returning to duty,” she said as she stopped before Tenger. The security chief’s gaze held no judgment, even though he had gone on record advocating that, given her condition, she not resume active duty so soon, especially in the middle of a crisis. It had been seven days since the portal had ceased to function, and ten since Linojj had lost her arm. It would require another couple of weeks before sickbay and the medical labs finished fabricating a biosynthetic replacement for her. After surgery to attach the new limb, she would need a recovery period, as well as physical, occupational, and emotional therapy—the last of which she had already begun. Tenger had stated in his log that he believed the best course of action, for both Linojj and the crew, would be for her to wait until after all of that had been completed before she resumed her position as the ship’s acting captain.
But the security chief appeared to carry none of those opinions with him as he regarded her in her first moments back on the bridge. Ever serious in the conduct of his duties—like so many of the Starfleet security personnel she’d met throughout her career—he showed no resistance to her decision to resume her station on Enterprise. It didn’t surprise her. He had never brought their friendship onto the bridge, nor even the closeness they’d once shared when, years ago, they had briefly been lovers.
“You have the conn, Commander,” Tenger said. “I stand relieved.”
“Return to your post, Commander.”
“Aye, sir.
Linojj watched Tenger as he moved to the tactical console and relieved Lieutenant Rainbow Sky, who shifted to a secondary station. When the first officer sat down in the command chair, she ran her hands along its arms, grateful to be back where she belonged—except that, no matter how much it felt as though she used both her hands, she didn’t, and couldn’t. It still seemed impossible that her right arm ended not at her hand, but at a metal cuff affixed just below her shoulder.
No hesitation, Linojj reminded herself. She knew what she had to do. She had already grieved for her traumatic loss, and she would doubtless continue to do so—though the fact of a replacement limb virtually indistinguishable from the original would mitigate her loss—but at that moment, she had responsibilities to discharge. “Status report.”
“Portable tractor beams have been installed on all of the shuttlecraft, including both warp shuttles, and all but one have been dispatched to the surface,” Tenger said. “All CMUs have likewise been deployed.” Enterprise had begun its current mission with a complement of a dozen class-H shuttlecraft, though only nine remained: Amundsen and Pytheas had traveled through the portal, and Eriksson had been destroyed eight months earlier, during the crew’s exploration of the massive construct they’d discovered in the Jalidor Lambda system. The ship also carried a pair of Gagarin-class warp shuttles, along with a half dozen cargo management units, the latter of which came equipped with tractor beams. “All auxiliary craft are in position,” Tenger went on, “and we are awaiting final placement of the antigravs.”
The first officer looked at the main viewscreen, where an engineering technician stood on the plain of snow and ash to which Linojj and her landing party had transported ten days earlier, just before she’d lost her arm. On the outside of the portal, the technician lifted a two-handled panel and set it squarely on a smooth patch of hull. “How long before we’ll be ready?” Linojj asked. Over the prior days, she’d requested that Tenger brief her on everything that had happened during her time in sickbay, as well as on the continuing efforts to recover the captain and the others.
“Commander Buonarroti estimates that preparations will be completed within fifteen minutes,” said the security chief.
“Acknowledged,” Linojj said. “Show me the entire portal.”
“Aye, sir,” Tenger said, and the first officer heard his fingers dancing across the tactical console. The image on the viewer, provided by an Enterprise probe, pulled back to reveal the entire structure of the portal, spreading out with a diameter of more than half a kilometer. Unidentifiable at such a remove, the ship’s auxiliary craft appeared only as specks evenly spaced around the outside of the circular construct. A moment later, though, insets appeared on the screen, picturing and naming the sixteen vessels.
Linojj quickly picked out the missing registry: NCC-1701-B/7, Galileo. She knew that one shuttlecraft had been left behind on the hangar deck because the security chief had not wanted to leave Enterprise completely without support vessels. Linojj wondered if he had specifically chosen to keep Galileo aboard, since it happened to be her favorite.
The next step in the plan to recover the captain and her landing party was simple: employing the ship’s auxiliary vessels and the tractor beams temporarily installed on them, the crew would lift the portal from the surface of Rejarris II and settle it in orbit, where its solar cells could renew its power, and therefore its function. Antigravs installed along the circumference of the structure would provide added stability. Though a delicate operation requiring pinpoint synchronization, it also seemed a straightforward effort and the most likely to work in a relatively short amount of time.
One of the other possibilities Tenger and Buonarroti had considered had been to utilize the facilities located eleven kilometers from the site of the portal. After contact with Captain Sulu and the other two crew members had been lost, and after efforts to determine how to reenergize the portal had gone on too long, Tenger had rescinded his previous order not to permit any of the crew on the surface of Rejarris II—both because of the exigency of recovering Sulu, Kostas, and Young, and because the danger the portal posed had disappeared with its loss of power. Lieutenant Commander Fenn led a landing party to the run of one-story buildings. As with every other place the crew had visited on the planet, they found it empty, but by virtue of the equipment there, they confirmed that it had been used to control the launch and reentry of the portal.
To exploit the capabilities of the facility, though, the crew would have had to overcome two impediments: they would have had to restore power to the buildings, and they would have had to learn how to operate the alien equipment. Even if they could quickly overcome the power requirements, the second problem stopped them cold. In the days since Linojj and the first landing party to Rejarris II had found books comprising chemically inscribed pages, Lieutenant Commander Kanchumurthi and his communications staff had tried to decipher that language. They believed that the inhabitants of Rejarris II “read” those chemical markers with a specialized sensory organ, but without knowledge of that organ, it made it extremely difficult to comprehend the process. As a result, even if the crew reestablished power to the launch complex, any attempt to raise the portal into orbit would have to be done blindly, with Enterprise’s engineers unable to read the labels and gauges on the equipment. With so much at stake—damage to the portal could result in the elimination of any chance to retrieve the captain and the others—Tenger and Buonarroti did not want to take the risk, except as a last resort—a position with which Linojj agreed.
“Commander Buonarroti reports that preparations are now complete,” Tenger said. “All antigravs have been put in place, all engineering personnel have returned to their assigned auxiliary craft, and all pilots have signaled their readiness.” Tenger had reached deep into the ship’s roster to identify the sixteen crew members best suited to helming the shuttlecraft and CMUs. Fortunately, while only a dozen personnel had been rated for posting to Enterprise’s helm position, Starfleet required all personnel to qualify to take the position in an emergency, and virtually everybody had spent time in simulators during their tenure as cadets. For the most part, the ship’s computer would handle flight operations anyway, because of the need for exacting coordination.
“Commence the operation,” Linojj ordered.
“Signaling all auxiliary craft to lift off,” Kanchumurthi said from the communications station. On the main viewer, nothing seemed to happen.
“Isolate one of the shuttlecraft on-screen,” Linojj ordered.
“Aye, sir,” Tenger said, and the image shifted to show Enterprise’s number 9 class-H vessel, de Laroche, rising beside the portal. It continued up for a short time before stopping and hovering. “All auxiliary craft have reached a height of thirty-five meters,” said the security chief.
“All vessels are reporting that they are in position to activate their tractor beams,” Kanchumurthi said.
“We are ready to switch control of the operation over to the computer,” Tenger said. Commander Buonarroti and his engineering team had calculated the forces that would put the least amount of strain on the portal during its move back into orbit, including the distance of the shuttlecraft and CMUs from the structure, the strength and number of the tractor beams, and the rate of ascent. In addition to placing antigravs at regular intervals around the portal for stability, they had also affixed remote sensors to the structure in order to actively and efficiently monitor the stresses during the lift.
“Engage computer control,” Linojj said.
“Aye, aye, sir,” Tenger said. On the main viewer, a bluish white cone of light emanated from below the bow of de Laroche, where the engineers had attached the portable tractor beam. It swept out to the portal and took hold of the massive structure.
“All remote sensors are reporting,” Fenn said at her sciences console. “Stresses are evenly distributed throughout the portal and within expected tolerances.”
“The auxiliary craft are beginning to rise,” Tenger said. The vessels would accelerate steadily to a safe, predetermined velocity until they had passed through the thermosphere and had reached the exobase. Once in the exosphere, they would increase speed again, at a considerably greater rate, until they could establish the portal in medium or high orbit. The operation would take hours to complete.
“Let’s see the whole structure again,” Linojj said. On the viewer, the image changed once more to display the entire portal. Although Enterprise’s auxiliary craft again became impossible to distinguish, Linojj could see the blue-white radiance of the sixteen tractor beams, which looked almost like glowing quills on the outside of the portal. The strategy called for the shuttlecraft and CMUs never to cross above the structure.
The assemblage took less than two hours to achieve its initial static atmospheric velocity. Linojj watched the procedure unfold, both in wider and narrower aspects. Over the course of the two hours, she ordered Tenger to cycle through close-up views of the six numbered cargo management units, the two warp shuttles—Armstrong and Tereshkova—and the eight class-H shuttlecraft—April, Shintral, Baré, Mitrios, McAuliffe, Archer, and Winter, in addition to de Laroche.
Almost three hours into the operation, Linojj heard the tactical console emit an alert tone. On the viewscreen, one of the tractor beams veered wildly, losing contact with the portal. “Shintral has a problem,” Tenger said.
Linojj pushed herself up, careful to remind herself that she had only one arm with which to do so. “Open a channel.”
“Open, sir,” Kanchumurthi said.
“Shintral, this is Verant,” came the immediate reply. The identity of Shintral’s pilot pleased Linojj. Although she had since moved into engineering, Verant had begun her tour of duty aboard Enterprise as a helm officer, and so she had experience in both disciplines. “We’re maintaining our course, but we’ve lost our hold on the portal.”
“What happened?” Linojj asked.
“We don’t know,” Verant said. “Ensign Michaels is investigating.”
“Commander,” Fenn said, “sensors are showing increased stresses in the portal’s hull where Shintral lost contact.”
“How bad?” Linojj wanted to know.
“Within tolerances,” Fenn said, “but increasing.”
Linojj quickly reached for the controls on the arm of the command chair and activated the intercom. “Bridge to Buonarroti,” she said. “Do you see what’s happening out there?”
“Buonarroti,” the chief engineer said. “Aye, I see it.”
“Do we stop the shuttlecraft until we can fix whatever’s happened?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Buonarroti said. “Decelerating will cause additional stresses.”
“Understood. Out,” Linojj said. Then, “Lieutenant Verant, have you located the problem?”
“Michaels here, Commander,” came the voice of the ensign. “It appears that one side of the mount for the portable tractor beam has failed and come loose.”
“Can you repair it?” Linojj asked, but Tenger spoke up before Michaels could answer.
“The direction of the tractor beam is beginning to fluctuate,” he reported. “If it should contact the portal at a different point—” Linojj didn’t need him to finish to understand the danger of altering the exactingly calculated stresses on the structure.
“Shintral, shut down your tractor beam now,” she said. On the viewscreen, the shuttlecraft’s beam winked off at once, but Linojj waited a beat until Tenger confirmed the deactivation. “Ensign Michaels, can you effect repairs?”
“If we return to the ship or to the planet’s surface, I can take a laser welder to it,” Michaels said.
“How much time?” Linojj asked, but she already knew the answer would be insufficient to stave off a catastrophe. She imagined transporting an environmental-suited engineer onto the roof of one of the other shuttlecraft in flight and having Verant maneuver Shintral over to it so that the mount for the portable tractor beam could be fixed, but she dismissed the scheme as too risky. Not waiting for Michaels to reply, Linojj said, “Lieutenant Verant, move your shuttlecraft away from the portal. Ten kilometers. Then wait for Enterprise to contact you.”
“Aye, Commander,” Verant said, without hesitation. Linojj made note to commend the lieutenant for her responsiveness.
“Enterprise out,” Linojj said.
“Shintral is moving away,” Tenger said.
“Captain, the stresses—” Fenn began, but Linojj talked over her.
“Syndergaard, take us in, fastest possible speed,” she said, striding over to stand beside the helm officer. In response, the ensign sent his hands dashing across his console. The sound of the ship changed as power increased and the ship moved. “Tenger, prepare the Enterprise’s tractor beam to substitute for Shintral’s. Can you tie the ship in to the computer’s coordination program?”
“We’ll have to,” Tenger said. “The Enterprise’s tractor beam is far more powerful than the portable models we attached to the shuttlecraft. We’ll need to make adjustments with respect to our distance from the portal and the intensity of our beam. We’ll also need to tie in to the helm to match velocities with the shuttlecraft.”
“Have engineering get on it now,” Linojj said. She rested her hand on Syndergaard’s shoulder. “Get the necessary distance information from Commander Buonarroti. Bring us into position and match speeds as best and as quickly as you can.”
“Yes, sir,” Syndergaard said.
Linojj looked at the main screen and saw that Shintral had already departed the operation, its missing tractor beam noticeably absent, giving the scene an unbalanced quality. “Viewer ahead.” The image jumped almost at once to show what lay before Enterprise: the murky form of Rejarris II, cloaked in its impact winter, filled the screen.
For Linojj, time seemed to pass too slowly. She turned aft and peered at the communications station. “Open a channel to all auxiliary craft,” she said.
Kanchumurthi worked his controls. “All vessels are receiving you, sir.”
“Linojj to all shuttlecraft and CMUs,” she said. “The portable tractor beam on Shintral has failed. The Enterprise is moving in to take its place, and the synch program will be adjusted accordingly. Maintain your positions. Enterprise out.”
“Commander, the portal’s hull is at risk of fracturing,” Fenn said.
“How long?” Linojj asked Syndergaard.
“Less than a minute.”
“Tenger?” Linojj asked.
“Commander Buonarroti has modified the synchronization routine to adapt the Enterprise’s tractor beam to match the intensity and sweep of the portable versions,” said the security chief. “But there isn’t enough time to couple the ship’s helm with those of the shuttlecraft and CMUs.”
Linojj wanted to pull Syndergaard from his console and take over the task herself. The first officer had spent four years at the helm of Enterprise and had more experience there than anybody aboard the ship. With only one arm, though, she could not outperform Syndergaard. And I don’t have to outperform Torsten, she thought. He’s as good as they get.
“Ensign Syndergaard, you’ll have to fill in for the computer,” Linojj said. “Do you think you can match speeds precisely with the shuttlecraft?”
“Yes, sir. Absolutely, sir.” Linojj appreciated hearing the confidence in the helm officer’s voice, which thankfully fell short of arrogance.
“Take us into position as soon as we arrive at the portal,” Linojj said. “Tenger, ready to engage the tractor beam program.”
“Aye.”
Seconds passed, and then Linojj heard the sound of the engines change even before she saw the portal become visible on the viewer against the backdrop of clouds. The first officer wished that Enterprise could have towed the structure into orbit by itself, but it could only have made such an attempt by employing its tractor beam over just a section of the enormous structure, and therefore unevenly. The ship’s emitter had neither the power nor the range to distribute a beam effectively around a circular object more than half a kilometer in diameter, and then to haul it into space from deep within the gravity well of a planet.
“We have arrived at the portal and are moving into position now,” Syndergaard said. Linojj watched the lieutenant’s fingers move nimbly across his panel. “Matching velocity with the shuttlecraft . . . and we are a go for tractor beam.”
“Tenger,” Linojj said at once. Never hesitate.
“Engaging computer control of our tractor beam.”
On the main screen, although she hadn’t requested it, the image changed from a view ahead to one of the portal section directly below Enterprise. A hazy blue-white beam appeared and unfurled toward the structure. Almost at once, Fenn announced, “Sensors are showing dramatically reduced stresses in Shintral’s arc of the portal.”
Linojj wanted to clap her hands together, something she wouldn’t have done even if she hadn’t lost one of her arms. The thought amused her, though, which she thought probably a good sign. “Well done, everybody,” she said. “Tenger, have Lieutenant Verant take Shintral back down to the surface and repair its tractor-beam mount as quickly as possible.” Under normal circumstances, she would have brought the shuttlecraft back aboard, but she didn’t want to risk impacting the current operation with a rendezvous inside the atmosphere.
“Aye, sir,” Tenger said.
“And prepare Galileo with a portable tractor beam as well, just in case we need it.”
Tenger relayed the order to Buonarroti, who confirmed that his engineers would set to modifying Galileo at once. As it turned out, the Enterprise crew didn’t need the services of the last shuttlecraft for the operation. By the end of alpha shift, the portal had been placed in high orbit.
♦ ♦ ♦
Demora Sulu sat at the main console on Amundsen, staring out at the terrain passing below without really seeing it. Instead, the face of her father rose in her mind, a frequent occurrence in the three days since the shuttlecraft crew had found the remnants of the Excelsior escape pod. As she had for the last few years, she tried to remember the last time that she’d actually seen him in person. For a long time, she thought it had been when Enterprise and Excelsior had overlapped their crews’ shore leaves at Starbase 11 a year or so before Command had lost all contact with her father’s vessel. Sulu retained a strong memory of sitting with him at the Black Hole Saloon, sharing a bottle of Aldebaran sparkling wine she’d saved for the occasion.
At some point, though, Sulu recalled that she’d broken out that particular vintage for Captain Harriman, on the day in 2307 when Enterprise’s refit had been completed and the ship returned to active status. Had she sipped a different wine with her father, or had it been another time when the two had last been together? During the long months of the modifications to Enterprise, Sulu had split her time between the engineering labs at Utopia Planitia, familiarizing herself with the forthcoming upgrades to the ship; Starfleet Academy on Earth, where she both taught and took classes; and, toward the end, in the shipyard, where she assisted Harriman in overseeing and reviewing the changes to their vessel. At the beginning of that period, though, she took three weeks’ leave, traveling to Riviera to enjoy her time off, and on the way back, she diverted to Starbase 71, where Excelsior had docked for repairs to its deflectors after an explosive encounter with a Revot destroyer. She spent half a day with her father aboard his ship.
But I know we had a drink together at the Black Hole, she thought. When was that? At any time through the years, she could have gone back through her logs and figured it all out, and perhaps one day she would, but she had so far chosen not to do so. She tried not to think about her confusion too much; she supposed that she preferred to cling to the memory of her time with her father at Starbase 11 as their last meeting, if only because it happened—or she thought it happened—closer to when he and his starship had gone missing.
“Captain?” Sulu realized that she had been addressed more than once. Ensign Young stood beside her, a concerned expression on his face.
“Yes, Ensign?” she said. “I’m sorry. I was just thinking.”
Young sat down next to her at the main console. His condition had improved considerably in the past couple of days. Kostas had capped his tracheostomy tube, making speech easier for him, and he had begun moving about the cabin. “Were you thinking about your father?”
Sulu blinked in surprise. “You certainly don’t lack for nerve, Ensign.” Rarely did young officers approach her with personal questions about her life. Not rarely, she corrected herself. Never.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Young said. He gazed down into his lap, obviously abashed. Sulu immediately regretted her response. Not only had Hawkins Young been through a great deal already in the past couple of weeks, but like herself and Kostas, he remained cut off not only from Enterprise, but from the entirety of what had been his life.
“No, Ensign, I’m sorry,” she said. “Yes, I was thinking about my father.”
Young raised his head, and Sulu recognized the genuine interest in his eyes. “I learned about him at the Academy,” he said. “Both in class and out. A few of my instructors had served with him, and they sometimes told the cadets stories. I also read about him on my own. I’ve always been interested in the histories of the great starship captains.”
Sulu felt her eyebrows rise. “I think my father would be surprised, and more than a little uncomfortable, being categorized as a ‘great starship captain.’ ”
“I’d have to argue with him, then,” Young said with a smile. “He had an amazing career, even going back to his days before he made captain. He was the third officer on the Enterprise when he had to take the conn and face down the Klingons at Organia. And when he served on the Courageous as second officer, he saved the Bajoran colony of Pillagra. There was also the part he played in retrieving Captain Spock, and then in saving Earth from the whale probe. And those are only a few of his exploits before he took over as the captain of the Excelsior.”
Exploits, Sulu thought, and she couldn’t prevent herself from smiling. She felt a sense of contented reflection, mixed with melancholy. Over the course of many years, she had heard about those incidents, and so many others, firsthand from her father. She imagined that she could provide Young with quite a few details that hadn’t made it into the official record. “He was a man with many talents, and with more interests than some entire crews. He could really tell a story, and as you’ve apparently learned, he had a lot of them to tell. He had a big laugh and was quick to use it, and he was fiercely loyal to his crewmates and friends. I think, in his own quiet way, he was a great man.” She paused for a moment, a bit apprehensive about speaking on such a personal level with the ensign, but also gratified to be remembering her father and talking about him. “He saved my life,” she concluded.
“I know,” Young replied. “At Askalon Five.”
Sulu hadn’t been thinking about that confusing and difficult time, which had ended with an army of rampaging clones pursuing her and her father, and the two Sulus nearly leaping together to their deaths. “I wasn’t actually referring to the incident at Askalon Five,” she told Young. “I was talking about when my mother died.”
“Oh,” Young said. Sulu could see that the prospect of learning more about his commanding officer intrigued him, but also that she’d shaken him by mentioning the death of her mother. “I . . . I’m sorry . . . I didn’t—”
“It’s all right, Ensign, you couldn’t know what I meant,” she said. Sulu became aware that Kostas, who had been sitting at the rear of the cabin and working on a padd, had turned her attention to the conversation. The captain, who scrupulously maintained her privacy around her crew, considered putting an end to the exchange, but she discovered that she didn’t want to; she wanted to talk about her father. What difference is it going to make, anyway? she thought. If we can’t get back to our own place and time—
But she didn’t want to contemplate that possibility just then. “I was six years old when my mother died,” she said. “She wasn’t with my father at the time, and so I didn’t even know him.” She surprised herself with her candor, but she didn’t feel the need for discretion. “I was devastated when I lost my mother; I was just a girl, and she was my whole world. I don’t really know what I would have done, where I would’ve gone or how I would’ve turned out, if not for my father welcoming me into his life when he found out about me.”
Young stayed silent for a moment, and then he finally managed again to say, “I’m sorry.” He could have intended his words about the death of her mother, or even about their own situation, separated from Enterprise and with their futures becoming more uncertain by the day, but she thought he referred to the crashed escape pod they’d found.
“It’s fine, Ensign,” Sulu said. “I suppose it’s good to finally know for sure what happened to my father.” Except that I don’t really know what happened to Dad, do I? Sulu asked herself. A destroyed Excelsior escape pod likely meant the destruction of the ship, but that didn’t tell her how or why that had taken place. Or how a pod ended up on this planet, she thought. Had her father and his crew abandoned ship near Rejarris II, and one or more of the escape craft passed through the portal? Or had Excelsior itself traveled through the looking glass, only to meet its demise on the other side—wherever and whenever that other side happened to be. Not only don’t I truly know the fate of my father, she thought, I now have more questions than ever—including the one I don’t really want to ask.
She asked it anyway. Could any of the Excelsior crew—including Dad—still be alive? If the survivors had passed through the portal, either on Excelsior or in escape pods, that could explain Starfleet losing contact with the crew, but that didn’t necessarily mean that they had all died.
Sulu didn’t like the question because it lacked a ready answer. Eleven years earlier, she had raised similarly unanswerable questions, over and over again, across months. Against all odds, she had held on to the hope that, despite his ship’s disappearance, her father had not perished. Coming to accept his death over time had perhaps made the process easier for her than it might otherwise have been, but she had no wish to do so all over again.
“It’s possible that he and the Excelsior crew could still be out there somewhere,” Young said.
“I suppose we’ll find out,” Sulu responded without much enthusiasm. After tricorder scans of the wreckage had confirmed its material consistency with that of Starfleet escape pods, she and Kostas had eventually located two more hull fragments that contained identifying information—in each case, a partial registry number. The first read C-200, and the second, CC-2, both consistent with Excelsior’s NCC-2000 designation. They had also detected genetic material, but it had been too badly damaged to classify, and in insufficient quantity to determine whether or not anybody had died there. Still, she could do little other than conclude that the pod had been launched by Excelsior.
On that basis, and allowing for the theoretical chance that one or more of the ship’s crew could have survived whatever calamity had befallen their ship, Sulu had initiated the continuous transmission of a message out across the planet. So far, they had received no response—neither from Excelsior survivors nor anybody else. She didn’t think that they would. Or at least that’s what I keep telling myself.
It actually troubled Sulu a great deal more that they had yet to receive word from Enterprise. It had been more than a week since the portal had lost power, severing her landing party’s contact with the ship. It clearly could require more time than that for the Enterprise crew to reenergize the structure, but she also wondered if something else had happened. Efforts to restore power to the portal could have inadvertently damaged it, or altered its settings, or even destroyed it. Even the most benign of those possibilities could add months or even years to a rescue attempt.
Because Sulu, Kostas, and Young had spent their time exploring the planet on which they found themselves, they’d traveled farther and farther afield from the area where they’d all first arrived. To ensure the continuity of communications with that location, from where the Enterprise crew would seek to contact them, the captain had seeded two comm relays along their exploratory path. Several times each day, they sent a transmission via the relays to Pytheas, the shuttlecraft that remained at the portal’s destination point, triggering it to transmit a return message. To that point, they had sent and received each message successfully. Sulu could only hope that they would hear from the Enterprise crew soon.
If we ever hear from them again, she thought, though the captain chastised herself for her negativity. Still, in addition to her responsibility for her own life, she had to consider Hawkins Young and Galatea Kostas. At some point, she would need to begin thinking about their next course of action. Even if they didn’t hear from the Enterprise crew in the near term, Sulu expected that she and the others would continue to search the planet in the hopes of locating those who had constructed the portal. If that effort ultimately failed, if she, Kostas, and Young could find no means of helping themselves return home, and if they did not hear again from the Enterprise crew, then Sulu would have to figure out a way to reach beyond the world and the planetary system where they’d been marooned—although she did not relish the prospect of facing an entirely unknown universe.
Except it’s not entirely unknown, is it? she thought. That much, at least, she believed she had verified. After sunset each day, she used the shuttlecraft’s sensors to record details of the night sky, and although virtually nothing looked familiar either to her or Amundsen’s computer, she still thought she’d found what she’d been searching for. With only a pair of planetary shuttlecraft on which to travel, though, it could prove impossible to cross the interstellar void to get her landing party where she wanted to take them. If she—
“Look,” Young said. Sulu saw him pointing through the forward port. Her heart raced for a moment, but when she gazed ahead of the shuttlecraft, she saw only more of the same unremarkable, undeveloped, unpopulated lowlands. “It’s a body of water.”
Sulu looked again, and that time, she did indeed see a band of blue just below the horizon. Kostas walked up from the rear of the cabin and peered through the port as Young operated the sensor panel. Eventually, he declared, “It’s an ocean.”
“An ocean?” Kostas echoed. “What should we do, Captain? Should we cross it so that we can search the next continent?”
“We haven’t finished exploring this one yet,” Sulu said. She didn’t add that she thought it far more likely that, if some of the Excelsior crew had survived, the shuttlecraft crew would find them not on the ocean, but on land.
Since leaving Pytheas behind, Sulu had flown Amundsen in the direction of the rising sun. As the shuttlecraft neared the shore, Sulu took control from the autopilot and banked to starboard. “We’ll follow the coastline for a while,” she said, “and then we’ll head back across the continent.”
In her mind, though, Sulu thought again about how she, Kostas, and Young could make it through interstellar space. With the resources on hand, it seemed impossible. But Sulu vowed to herself that, if she had to, she would find a way.
♦ ♦ ♦
Rafaele Buonarroti stood in the middle of the Enterprise bridge beside Commander Linojj, trying to keep his eyes on the image on the main viewscreen. He had difficulty concentrating. The chief engineer felt extremely uncomfortable, though he admonished himself for indulging such a selfish emotion.
Buonarroti had spent the previous two days down in the hangar deck and main engineering, first preparing to lift the portal from the surface of Rejarris II and return it to orbit, and then in the actual execution of that plan. Commander Linojj had returned to duty during that time, and he had spoken with her several times, but only via intercom. When he had walked onto the bridge a few moments earlier, it marked the first time that he had seen the results of her injury. Although he knew that she would be fitted with a biosynthetic replacement—he was actually assisting Doctor Morell and the medical staff with some of the synthetic components—seeing her with only one arm shocked him in a visceral way. He could only hope that he had succeeded in hiding his distress—or if he hadn’t, that she would forgive him.
I also need to be forgiven for not visiting her in sickbay, Buonarroti thought. They had been crewmates for a dozen years, and friends for almost as long. He could plead that he had been entrenched in the efforts to restore power to the portal, which would not be a lie, but he also knew that he could have—should have—stopped by sickbay to see her, which was a more important truth.
“What’s your assessment?” Linojj asked him.
“Um . . . well . . .” he stammered, but he had nothing to say. He felt foolish, like the boy in school who did everything at his desk but pay attention, and then, when asked a question by the teacher, had to hem and haw his way through a non-answer.
“Let’s take a closer look,” Linojj said quietly, and she headed around the navigation console toward the forward section of the bridge. Buonarroti dutifully followed, wondering if the first officer—and current acting captain—was taking him out to the woodshed. He trailed her up the steps to the bridge’s outer ring, then over to stand beside her in front of the viewer. So close to the large screen, he could not make any sense of what he saw.
Before he could say anything—and he really didn’t want to complain, not after the way he’d behaved—Linojj leaned in toward him. She moved in so close that, without thinking about it, he expected to feel her arm against his. When that didn’t happen, the incredibly serious nature of her injury struck him again.
“It’s okay,” Linojj said, so softly that the chief engineer doubted anybody else on the bridge could hear her. “I know how squeamish you can be.”
His initial reaction, no doubt born out of masculine pride, was to dissemble, but he quickly rejected that approach. He’d already let down his friend—and himself—and he would not compound his transgression with an affront to Linojj’s intelligence. “I’m sorry,” he said, keeping his voice low. “I should’ve come to see you in sickbay, I should’ve—”
“Rafe,” Linojj interrupted. “I said it’s okay, and it really is. I know how hard these things can be for you, and I also know how busy you’ve been in helping to figure out how to recover the captain and the others.”
“Even so,” Buonarroti said, “I feel badly that I didn’t visit you.”
“Well, we’re still friends,” she said.
“Thanks,” he said. A rush of affection for Linojj filled him up. He didn’t think that even a Betazoid could have demonstrated more empathy than she just had. And after what she’s been through—
“We’re still friends,” Linojj said, “but right now, I need the Enterprise’s chief engineer.” She turned and made her way back down to the center of the bridge, circling around the helm. Once again, Buonarroti followed.
When he looked up at the viewer, he saw the surface of Rejarris II. There, a great circular structure lay on its side. It looked like the portal, back in the same place from which virtually Enterprise’s entire fleet of auxiliary craft had lifted it a day earlier. “What . . . what happened?” He could barely ask the question, considering the implications it had for the captain’s rescue.
“That’s not the portal, Commander,” Linojj said. “But that is where it was.”
“I don’t understand,” Buonarroti said.
To Tenger, she said, “Magnify.”
“Aye, sir.”
The image skipped to a much tighter view, showing only a portion of the great circle. That close, Buonarroti could see that the portal no longer stood there, but had been replaced by a dark, flat surface set into the ground. A single silver stripe ran along its center. “What is that?” he asked.
“It’s a metal slab that rested beneath the portal,” Linojj said. “Ensign Young noticed it when we first transported down to the structure.”
“But it wasn’t attached to it?”
“No,” Linojj said. “But it measures precisely the same linear dimensions as the portal. So my question to you is the same as yours was to me: what is that?”
Buonarroti stared at the viewscreen, then raised his hand and wrapped it around the bottom of his face. He felt stubble and realized that he hadn’t shaved that morning. “Does the slab contain any circuitry?” he asked.
Linojj looked toward the tactical station. “Not that the landing party’s tricorders or the probe’s sensors can detect,” Tenger said. “It’s thick—twenty-five centimeters through—and as best we can tell, solid steel, with a band of platinum running through it.”
Buonarroti considered what little they knew about the portal, including what they’d actually witnessed. “I think it could be a landing pad,” he said.
“That’s what Ensign Young suggested as well,” Linojj said.
“Would a landing pad be made of such an unforgiving surface?” Tenger asked. “It has no antigravs, no tractor beams, no guidance systems.”
“It needs to bear the weight of the portal,” Buonarroti pointed out. “The portal itself has antigravs and tractor beams, and the complex eleven kilometers away—what we believe is a launching-and-landing control facility—has equipment we recognize as a guidance system.” He paused, then asked, “How did we find the portal in the first place?”
“We followed a trail of particles from high orbit down to the surface,” Tenger said.
Buonarroti nodded, thinking about how various civilizations maintained their satellites. “The portal was damaged in space,” he said. “Maybe a meteor strike, or something else in orbit colliding with it, or even some internal piece of equipment failing catastrophically.”
“We believe it might have been fired upon with an energy weapon,” Linojj said. “At least, the evidence seems consistent with that possibility.”
“Whatever happened to it, the technicians at the launch-and-recall facility must have brought it back down to the surface so they could repair it,” Buonarroti reasoned. “Or if the damage occurred after the inhabitants of Rejarris Two had already departed, then the facility could have been preprogrammed to recall the portal.”
“So you think the metal slab is just a landing pad, just a target?” Linojj asked. “You don’t think that it’s vital to the operation of the portal, that the platinum ring plays some part in establishing the transition from Rejarris Two to wherever it leads?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Buonarroti said. “The portal has thrusters and antigravs, it has a facility designed to launch it. It was meant to function in orbit, not down on the planet.”
“But why?” Linojj wanted to know. “If you’re going to transplant people from one planet to another, why not do so on the ground, if that’s possible—and we’ve seen that it is.”
Buonarroti shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe to increase the efficiency of the solar cells. Maybe the portal caused ecological problems inside an atmosphere. Or maybe it once functioned in both directions, and the inhabitants of Rejarris Two feared something coming over from the other side.”
Linojj seemed to take in the chief engineer’s opinions. As she did so, Science Officer Fenn said, “Commander, sensors indicate that the portal has reached full power.”
“Put it on-screen,” Linojj said as she walked to the command chair and sat down. Buonarroti moved to the periphery of the bridge, to one of the engineering consoles. On the main viewer, the metal band on the surface of Rejarris II vanished, replaced by the circular form of the portal, hanging in space, its dark form gleaming where the system’s star reflected off it. Around it, four shuttlecraft held it in place with tractor beams.
“It looks no different,” Tenger noted, and Buonarroti agreed. Nothing on it moved, no lights shined, no thrusters functioned. The chief engineer worked his panel and tapped into Fenn’s sensor scan. He confirmed her readings. Enterprise sat a hundred kilometers away from the device, and in a higher orbit—plainly a safe distance.
“One thing that’s different is that I don’t see any tractor beams other than our own,” Linojj said.
“The portal’s tractor beams have power,” Fenn reported. “But as you noted yourself, Commander, its beams engaged and pulled Ensign Young through it only once he stood on the device itself. The tractor beam that reached out for you did so only after you had climbed atop it as well. And the beams that attacked Captain Sulu’s shuttlecraft did so when it crossed over the portal’s perimeter.”
“So it has a threshold that, if crossed by an object, activates the tractor beams, which then pull the object through the portal,” Buonarroti said. “Imagine a cylinder at right angles to the circle. Anything that enters that cylinder triggers the beams.”
“It must have a range,” Tenger said.
“I’m sure it does, and we’re about to find out what it is,” Linojj said. “Commander Tenger, you have probes ready to launch?”
“Aye, sir,” Tenger said. “We prepared some for testing purposes, and we programmed one to travel to the location Captain Sulu and the ensigns traveled to when they passed through the portal; it will then transmit your message to the captain.”
“Acknowledged,” Linojj said. “Commander Kanchumurthi, contact the shuttlecraft and have them return to the Enterprise. Remind the pilots to keep their vessels well outside the activation perimeter of the portal’s tractor beams.”
“Right away, sir,” said Kanchumurthi. As the communications officer relayed Linojj’s orders, the shuttlecraft’s tractor beams shut down, leaving the portal in orbit under its own power. The auxiliary vessels quickly departed the area.
“The portal’s thrusters are firing,” Fenn said. On the viewer, Buonarroti could just make out small bursts at various points around the circular hull. “It appears to be aligning itself perpendicular to the surface of the planet. It is not moving far.”
“Commander Tenger, you said that you initially found the portal by following a trail of particles that originated in orbit?” Buonarroti asked.
“Aye.”
“Did the shuttlecraft bring the portal to the beginning of that trail?” Buonarroti asked.
“They did,” Linojj answered. “We believe that’s where the portal orbited, so that’s where we placed it.”
“Then that’s why it’s realigning itself, but not moving very far,” Buonarroti said. “You’ve placed it where it belongs.”
“That was the plan,” Linojj said.
Ten minutes later, Tenger reported that all four shuttlecraft had returned without incident to the ship. “The first probe has been programmed to travel directly toward the center point of the portal. Once it has passed through, it will travel one kilometer in a straight line, reverse course, and attempt to return to the Enterprise in the opposite direction.”
“Deploy the probe and keep it on-screen,” Linojj ordered. Buonarroti watched with the rest of the bridge crew as Tenger launched the probe. The missile-shaped device had a hooded tip containing a sensor cluster, as well as an outboard sensory ring that circled its midsection. Nobody spoke but Tenger, who provided a countdown of the probe’s range from the portal every twenty kilometers. At ten, he began announcing the distance in increments of one.
Buonarroti kept expecting tractor beams to streak out into space and take hold of the probe, but even as it drew closer to the portal, nothing happened. The closer it got, the more the chief engineer feared that, in hauling the structure from the surface of Rejarris II and into orbit, the Enterprise crew had somehow damaged it, preventing its function. If that had happened, then they might have destroyed any chance to rescue the captain and the two ensigns.
“Three kilometers,” Tenger intoned. “Two kilometers . . . one kilometer . . .”
And still nothing happened.
Buonarroti felt defeated as the probe soared through the portal. Almost at once, though, tractor beams lashed out. Snared by the gold beams, the probe slowed. After it came to a full stop, it was dragged backward along its course. When it passed through the portal a second time, it vanished. “We’re on the wrong side,” Buonarroti said.
“Ensign Syndergaard, take us around to face the portal from the other direction,” Linojj said. “Lieutenant Aldani, maintain a minimum one hundred kilometer distance at all times, and keep us outside its cylindrical threshold, no matter how far from it we are.” After the two officers acknowledged their orders, Linojj said, “Commander Tenger, as soon as we’re in position, prepare to launch the message to Captain Sulu.”
♦ ♦ ♦
In her dream, Demora Sulu fell.
At first, she had been striding down a corridor on Enterprise, the ship bustling with activity. Her crew moved about, their familiar faces a comfort to her. She saw Xintal Linojj and Tenger, Rafaele Buonarroti and Uta Morell. Hawkins Young and Galatea Kostas. John Harriman passed by, but even though that should have seemed wrong, it didn’t.
From around the curve of the corridor, Borona Fenn had approached—but not Fenn as Sulu presently knew her. A younger, pre-Shift version of the Frunalian. The science officer’s chitinous exomembrane still covered her youthful gray-green flesh, which had yet to darken and harden to its eventual leathery consistency. Her four mammary glands had not developed, nor had her eltis, the sensory organ that stretched like a fleshy mane from the top of her nose, across the center of her skull, and down the back.
As Fenn had neared, small fragments of her exomembrane had fallen away, dropping like dead leaves at her feet. The closer she got to Sulu, the larger the pieces that sloughed from her body, the pieces of chitin crashing to the deck and shattering with a ringing, insistent clatter. When Fenn walked by, Sulu watched as the ridges on the backs of the Frunalian’s shoulders fractured and plunged to the floor, where they splintered into uncounted bits and added to the clamor.
Up ahead, Demora’s father had strolled through an open door. He had no arms. She passed him without saying a word, continued along the corridor, through the entryway, and into a desert waste. An empty, arid plain reached in every direction, and when Demora turned, Enterprise had gone, leaving her alone on the open plateau.
And then the ground collapsed beneath her and she fell, sliding down a hard incline.
Sulu woke with a start. Her arms flew to her sides, her movements limited by the bedroll in which she slept. Somebody screamed and kept on screaming.
Sulu opened her eyes in dim light. Awareness snapped back to her at once, a manifestation of her many years high up in a starship’s chain of command. As second officer of Enterprise, as first officer, and as captain, she had often been awakened in circumstances urgently requiring her attention. She immediately recalled the situation: unable even to contact her ship, she was stranded with two of her young officers in a shuttlecraft on an unknown world, in an uncertain place and time.
Something felt wrong, though—something more than the screams Sulu heard, which her waking mind distinguished not as somebody’s voice, but as the proximity alert the Amundsen crew had set before retiring for the night. She pushed herself up, but too easily: the deck beneath her had canted, lowering her feet beneath the level of her head. She quickly pulled her arms from her bedroll and reached up along the bulkhead, searching for the control panel there.
When Sulu at last found it and switched on the overhead lighting panels, a confused jumble of shapes greeted her in the cabin. The rear section of the compartment had dropped a meter or so below the bow, and she had slid down the deck feet-first into the aft bulkhead. Opposite her, Ensign Young had slid down the length of his antigrav stretcher, his head and shoulders pressed into a rear corner as he scrambled out from beneath his bunched bedclothes. Sulu did not at first see Ensign Kostas, who had also slept in a bedroll on the deck, but then the engineer’s hand appeared from the equipment storage area, where she had clearly been thrown. Kostas pushed aside a tangle of the three freestanding chairs they had not removed from the cabin, which had piled up together in front of the entry to the storage compartment.
“What happened?” Young called out over the blaring alarm. He sounded dazed.
“Proximity alert,” Sulu yelled back, though she knew that didn’t answer the question. She crawled out of her bedroll and pulled herself up the deck, improvising handholds along the bulkhead. When she reached the main console, she perched on the front edge of one of the two seats there, both of which had been fixed in place.
Sulu deactivated the alert, bringing welcome silence down around them—except that, as she searched for both the cause of the alarm and whatever had thrown the shuttlecraft about, she heard other, gentler sounds. A patter almost like a light rain trickled down on the hull of Amundsen at various points. Stressed metal occasionally offered a low groan. Another sound, a scraping sort of a noise, but deeper, seemed to translate through the hull as though from far away.
The captain looked through the front viewport and made out broken walls of earth all around. She pushed herself forward so that she could peer straight up, where she saw a scrap of dawn sky just visible perhaps ten or so meters above the shuttlecraft. “The ground collapsed beneath us,” she told Kostas and Young. When they had halted their explorations of the planet the previous night, they had set down on the edge of a desert. “Amundsen fell into a sinkhole, or maybe a cave system.” As she gazed upward through the port, a drift of dirt sprinkled down against it, explaining the rainlike noise she heard.
Something moved up above, blotting out the small patch of sky, and an instant later, a great, dark form landed on the ground before the viewport. Sulu recoiled, and she heard one of the ensigns cry out in surprise behind her. Two large oval eyes stared into the shuttlecraft from a triangular head that swayed from side to side at the end of a long, serpentine neck. The many-legged bulk of the creature filled the port.
For a strangely quiet moment, the fearsome beast did nothing but look into the cabin. Sulu remained still, but in her mind, she visualized the console before her, marking the locations of the controls she needed. The shuttlecraft carried no armaments and possessed no real defenses beyond a navigational deflector and a force field for the hull. She hoped the latter would be enough for her purposes.
When the creature jerked its head back and raised its spiked front appendage high, Sulu knew what would come next. She looked down at the main console, thrust her hands across the control surfaces to activate and intensify the force field around the hull, then threw her arms up to protect her head. The creature’s appendage slammed into the viewport with staggering power. The creature uttered a short, low howl, but it didn’t move away.
Instead, it reared its front appendage back and drove it once more into the port. Sulu reached for the helm controls, but then the shuttlecraft moved, the aft end slipping backward and the bow crashing down. The captain fell forward. Her head struck the console. She wiped her hand across her hairline, and her fingers came away streaked with blood.
Ignoring her injury, Sulu glanced up through the port. The shuttlecraft had leveled off, but she could no longer see the sky. She didn’t know if she could maneuver Amundsen up and out of the pit into which it had been dropped, but she would try. Her head throbbed as she worked the helm controls. The drive rumbled to life, its steady thrum undoubtedly magnified and quavered by the surrounding earth and stone. She directed the shuttlecraft to rise, and it did, but not even a meter at best.
Beside her, Kostas threw herself down into the cockpit’s second seat. “I’m on sensors,” she said, her voice strong, if not completely steady.
Sulu pushed the shuttlecraft, trying to force it upward. It didn’t move. The drive moaned in response.
“We’re eleven-point-two meters beneath the surface,” Kostas said. “We’re in what looks like a chamber that’s been hollowed out. It’s barely larger than the shuttlecraft. There’s almost no room to maneuver, and virtually no space at all above the bow. It also looks like several boulders have fallen into the hole after us.”
Blocking our escape route, Sulu thought but didn’t say.
Amundsen rocked again. Sulu peered through the port. The dark hulk of the creature that had already assaulted the shuttlecraft moved in the shadows up ahead, but it had not attacked again. That meant that a second had joined the first.
As though to confirm her inference, something thumped above the rear of the shuttlecraft, which shook once more. “How many?” she asked Kostas. “How many of those things are out there?”
“I’m having trouble isolating life signs,” the ensign said. “Actinides in the rocks are interfering with biosensors.”
“Check for movement,” Sulu said, raising her voice as another blow rained down on the roof at the aft end of the shuttlecraft. The force field around the hull appeared to prove no impediment whatsoever to the creatures.
Kostas jabbed at her controls. “One in front, one behind . . . there may be two on top of the shuttlecraft . . . and I’m reading more movement coming down the hole.”
Five of the creatures! Sulu thought, recalling well how it had required two phasers set to kill to bring even one of them down.
The creature in front of the shuttle charged. It rammed into the viewport at speed, turning to the side at the last instant and sending the mass of its cylindrical body against the transparent pane. To Sulu’s horror, a jagged crack formed.
“The force fields aren’t stopping them,” Kostas said, even as another thunderous noise resounded atop Amundsen.
Up ahead, the creature scuttled backward, and Sulu knew that it would storm the shuttlecraft again. Amundsen shuddered before it did, attacked that time from the rear. “They’re pounding the shuttle on three sides: fore, aft, and overhead,” Kostas said.
“Brace yourselves,” Sulu called out. She operated the helm again, and the shuttlecraft surged forward. The bow struck the creature in front of them and smashed it against boulders at the side of the hole. Amundsen crashed to a halt, throwing Sulu and Kostas up against the console. The creature issued a piercing wail, and when Sulu pushed herself back into her chair, she saw trails of a syrupy violet ichor running down the cracked viewport. Several of the creature’s mangled limbs twitched, but its head lolled on its long neck at a sickening angle.
Sulu worked the helm, trying again to fly Amundsen up and out of where it had fallen. The drive yowled as it attempted to translate power into velocity, but the shuttlecraft didn’t move. Sulu changed tactics, reversing course. Amundsen surged backward, until it could move no more, slamming to a stop. She heard the rasping cry of another creature as a string of indicator lights on her panel flashed red. The drive sounded in one moment as though it might explode, but in the next, it cycled down with a whine.
That’s two of them down, Sulu thought. “Movement?” she asked.
“Checking,” Kostas said. Sulu saw the ensign’s hands trembling as she tried to cull information from the sensors. “The creature in front of the shuttlecraft isn’t moving, and neither is the one behind. There’s motion partway down the hole—”
Two massive blows struck Amundsen from above. Sulu looked back and saw dents in the overhead. She also saw that Ensign Young had gathered phaser pistols. “Two per person,” Sulu told him, and he turned and picked up three more weapons. He darted to the front of the cabin and handed two each to the captain and Kostas.
Another set of blows beat down on the shuttlecraft. Small cracks appeared in the overhead. The creatures continued pounding the hull. “Set phasers to kill,” Sulu said, adjusting both of her weapons.
Amundsen quaked again and again. In one aft corner of the cabin, just above Sulu’s bedroll, a flap of the overhead peeled away from the bulkheads and bent downward. A rank odor spilled into the shuttlecraft.
More blows struck the roof, and the flap of the overhead bent down farther, opening up a larger whole. Sulu saw the black tip of a creature’s leg for an instant as it worked to give itself access to its prospective next meal. Sulu raised both her weapons. “Ready,” she quietly told her crew.
Suddenly, the pounding on the roof of the shuttlecraft stopped. Kostas cocked her head to one side, listening intently. “What—”
The creature moved with amazing swiftness. It folded its legs through the hole it had opened in the shuttlecraft, pulling its body through until it stood there, facing them, a malevolent force bent on killing. It moved like a swarm, its many limbs and joints a sea of motion. Its triangular head swayed on its long, twisting neck, its outsize eyes cold and menacing. It was larger than the one that had attacked Ensign Young.
“Fire!” the captain yelled as she depressed the activation pads on the grips of her phasers.
Six reddish yellow beams streaked into the creature, the high-pitched keens of the weapons loud in the enclosed space, the heat produced by them immediately noticeable. The creature charged through the phaser fire. One of its legs jammed into Sulu’s chest, pushing her backward into the main console. The beams of her phasers veered wildly, and she saw one strike the aft bulkhead. She stopped firing.
The creature’s spiked front appendage swung through the air, missing her face by mere centimeters, but then she heard Kostas cry out next to her. The creature’s body loomed over her. Sulu brought her hands up and pushed the emitter ends of her phasers against it. She fired.
The creature bellowed, its cry a mixture of shock and pain. It fell back. Sulu glanced to her side and saw Kostas down on the deck, blood spilling from a deep cut in the right side of her face, from ear to mouth.
“Keep firing!” she told Young, who had dropped his phasers to his sides. He raised them again and sent directed energy into the creature.
Sulu kneeled down beside Kostas, who moaned in agony. She had lifted her hand up to her face. Blood flowed between her fingers. Sulu desperately looked about for anything she could use to stem the bleeding. One of the bedrolls lay just a meter away, and she scurried forward on her hands and knees to grab it, aware of the phaser beams shooting not that far above her.
The captain grabbed the bedroll and pulled it over to Kostas. Sulu set down her phasers and bunched the fabric in one hand. With the other, she lifted the ensign’s hand away from her face, pushed the bedroll against her wound, then let Kostas hold the makeshift bandage in place.
Sulu quickly retrieved her weapons, crawled away, and stood back up. Even as the beams of Young’s phasers blasted the creature, it lurched forward. Two of its legs suddenly stabbed toward the ensign, knocking the phasers from his hands as he was thrown against the bulkhead. He fell to the floor, unmoving. With no phasers firing, a momentary, deathly silence enveloped the shuttlecraft.
The creature swung its neck down, bringing it face-to-face with Sulu. The captain couldn’t tell what she saw in its eyes. Anger and pain, certainly, but did she see some level of understanding as well? Or was that simple hunger? She didn’t know, and at that moment, she didn’t care.
Sulu brought both arms up and fired point blank into the creature’s head. It shrieked and tottered backward, seeming to try to stay on its feet. Sulu continued firing. The smell of singed flesh filled Amundsen like a noxious fog.
At last, the creature collapsed. Another stood behind it.
Sulu redirected her aim, but too late. The second creature—The fourth, Sulu told herself, with another coming down the hole—raced across the crumpled body of the first and thrust its front appendage at her. Sulu felt the impact, but she was surprised when she wasn’t thrown backward by the blow. She looked down and saw the creature’s appendage sticking into her abdomen. She knew that in the next moment, it would pull the barbed tip back out of her body, eviscerating her. With almost no thoughts and no hope, Sulu placed her phaser against the appendage and squeezed the activator pad. The limb exploded in a hail of burned flesh and blood.
Sulu tried to fire again, even as she heard the welcome whine of more phasers. Kostas! she thought, realizing that the ensign must have found the determination and strength to find her weapon and shoot, though all of that seemed very far away, at the end of some hazy tunnel. Sulu could no longer stand, and she dropped to her knees, then fell down onto her side.
Her breathing grew shallow, and she felt cold sweat streaming down her face. Pain like nothing she had ever felt radiated up from her midsection, but like her conscious mind, it seemed to fade with each passing second. With her head against the deck and her eyes focused on the space just before her, she could not see the battle, but she still heard it. Phasers firing, roars from the creature. It seemed to go on for a long time, but she knew that she could no longer trust her perceptions. Still, even in extremis, it pleased her to hear the sounds of her crew’s weapons. It meant that they yet survived, and even if Sulu herself wouldn’t, it gave her hope. She held on to her certainty that the Enterprise crew would find a way to reenergize the portal and reestablish contact with Kostas and Young. And even if Linojj and the crew couldn’t figure out a means of bringing the two ensigns back, Sulu thought she knew how it could be done.
And it needs to be done, Sulu thought. I don’t want Kostas and Young just to survive; I want them to live. For that, she knew, they would have to return home.
Time seemed to take on a malleable quality. Sulu didn’t know if seconds or minutes or even hours passed. Her consciousness brightened and darkened, something that felt no longer anchored to reality. She tried to refocus, and she saw Ensign Young across the cabin from her, propped up against the bulkhead. A phaser lay on the deck beside his open hand, which was covered in blood. Beside him, a tangle of legs and viscera and violet ichor brought bile into Sulu’s throat. She closed her eyes against the image.
Sounds of movement drifted to her in the self-imposed darkness. She remembered that Kostas had counted five creatures: one in front of the shuttlecraft, one in back, and two atop it, with one descending down into the hole. Sulu opened her eyes and looked for her phaser. Though she could not move her head, she hoped she could find the strength to take her weapon in hand one final time. If she could do anything to prevent it, she would not die as some nightmarish creature’s meal, even if that meant finishing her life by her own hand. She had faced similar choices before, and had made similar decisions.
“Captain,” she heard a voice call, though it sounded like neither Kostas nor Young. Across the cabin, the creature she’d believed dead began to move, which sent a chill through her failing body, but then she saw legs—humanoid legs in a Starfleet uniform—pushing past the remains. “Here, Captain.”
Yes, I’m here, she thought, but not for long. But she rejoiced. The Enterprise crew must have restored power to the portal and then found a way to make it function in both directions. They had come to bring Sulu and her crewmates back home—too late for Sulu, but that no longer mattered to her. What mattered was that Kostas and Young would be saved.
A face suddenly filled Sulu’s vision. She didn’t recognize it. Am I wrong? she asked herself. Is this not my crew? Is this some other lost crew—maybe that of Excelsior?
“Captain, it’s all right,” the man said. “Help is on the way.” He looked away, then pointed somewhere. “There,” he said, though not to Sulu. When he peered back at her, he said, “Hang on, Captain.”
She didn’t think she could. She closed her eyes again, waiting for death. Then somebody else said something to her in a voice she hadn’t heard in a long time, but she knew it at once. She opened her eyes again.
Her father looked back at her, his eyes filled with tears. “I’m here, honey,” he said. “Stay with me.”
“Lost,” Demora said—or tried to say. The word came out in a spray of blood. “You’re still lost.” Barely a whisper, but she saw that her father had heard her.
“Yes, I’m still lost,” he said. “I’ll tell you all about that, but first we need to get you better.” He turned away from her and raised his voice. “Get the doctor down here now!”
Now won’t be soon enough, Sulu thought as she felt herself fading. But she had one final duty. With the last bit of strength she could muster, she lifted her hand and reached out to her father. Even if she could not save herself, maybe she could still save him . . . save Kostas and Young . . . save whoever else there was. “Tell Linojj,” she started, but then her voice sputtered into a cough. The movement sent fresh spasms of pain coursing through the middle of her body.
“It’s all right, honey,” her father said. “Don’t try to speak.”
“No . . . no . . . listen to . . .” she said, then stopped to refocus. “Tell Linojj on . . . Ent’prise . . . contact Ad . . . Ja Harr’man . . .” Her vision began to blur at the edges, and she knew she didn’t have much time. “Tell him . . . I confirm . . . Odyssey solution.”
That was all she had. She hoped it would be enough. Demora Sulu closed her eyes, and that time, she kept them closed.