ONE

Stardate 4757.4 (0848 hours)

Two days after leaving C-15, McCoy was still restless. Together with Christine Chapel, the Enterprise’s head nurse, he was organizing the medical supplies that they’d gotten from Phi Kappa. Tedious but necessary work. They’d been at it for a while, and just as the doctor had feared, it was allowing his mind to wander.

Maybe it was time for him to move on. He’d heard that Starfleet was beginning to put together crews for the next generation of ships to succeed the Constitution class. If he managed to finagle himself onto one of their duty rosters, he’d be able to go really far out, blazing new trails in frontier medicine.

The problem was, he’d be disappointing his captain and his friend. Not only would Jim have to search for his third CMO in four years, he would take McCoy’s desertion personally. Either way, McCoy would be miserable, but it was a feeling he was already intimately accustomed to.

He and Chapel were interrupted in their work by the arrival of Lieutenant Kelowitz. He claimed to be a patient, but insisted that he would talk only to McCoy. “That’s never a good sign,” McCoy whispered to Chapel. He took the young man into his office, sitting down behind his desk while Kelowitz stood, his hands flapping around uselessly. Kelowitz was a little shorter than the doctor, and his hair a little lighter. They’d been on a couple of landing parties together, but McCoy knew virtually nothing about him apart from the fact that he was a tactical officer.

McCoy nodded toward the chair, and the other man sat down, though he still didn’t know what to do with his hands, folding and unfolding them repeatedly.

“Now, tell me what’s the matter, son.” Whatever Kelowitz might reveal, it would be hard to embarrass McCoy after twenty years of medical practice, so he used his most reassuring tone.

“Doctor, I was wondering if you could give me some advice.”

“Advice?”

“You’ve, um, helped out others before, and I was hoping you could do the same for me.”

“You’ll have to tell me what this is about first.”

Kelowitz avoided looking directly at him. “It’s personal. You see, I’ve been working with Mister DeSalle recently, and—He’s kind of—”

McCoy was beginning to get a pretty clear idea of what the young man was really here for. “Lieutenant, I’m just the ship’s doctor…”

“Um… sorry, sir. But Demick told me that Brent told her that you told him that when he—”

McCoy breathed in deeply. Clifford Brent, one of his med techs, had landed a secondary assignment on the bridge, and the doctor had given him advice on how to handle the senior staff, especially Spock. The thought that his advice was a sought-after commodity evaporated his bad mood. McCoy stood up and sat on the desk, adopting a casual air. “Okay, tell me what the problem is.”

Ten minutes later, McCoy had sent Kelowitz on his way, no longer fidgeting. Chapel gave him an amused look as he emerged from his office. “What was that about?”

McCoy shook his head. “Just a young man needing some advice.” He looked at the tray of tri-ox cartridges in front of him, waiting to be sorted, and just like that, his bad mood was back. He could use some advice.

Hoping to keep his mind from lingering on painful thoughts, he started counting off cartridges, but lost track in the low twenties. He grumbled, “Why do I have to be stuck here while Kirk and Spock are having fun? M’Benga should be here, and I should be there.”

Chapel had put up with his complaining the past few days, but this time she surprised him. “So you’ve said repeatedly, Doctor.” Her gentle tone didn’t quite cover her annoyance.

McCoy snorted and restarted his counting.

“What’s the matter, Doctor?” asked Chapel at last.

He lost track in the upper fifties this time. “Dammit, Christine! I was almost done!”

“Sorry, Doctor.” She turned her attention back to her slate.

“Nothing’s the matter.” He was unable to stop himself. “Why should something be the matter? I like counting tri-ox capsules and supervising cargo transfers and being trapped on a boring starship on a boring mission while Kirk and Spock gallivant around the galaxy.”

Chapel didn’t look up, but even so, McCoy realized that maybe he was going a little too far. His volatile nature was sometimes difficult to manage, especially when he felt he was doing work that didn’t make use of his experience. Well, Chapel had taken worse from him before; she was certainly used to his occasional dark moods.

McCoy reached for the first tri-ox capsule, to start yet again, when the deck under his feet moved abruptly and he was knocked forward. In an instant, the lights went out and all the displays shut off. His hand hit something large and flat, which shot away and crashed onto the floor—it must’ve been the tray.

“What—” Chapel began, but she cut herself off when the lights all whirred back to life. No sooner had McCoy regained his bearings than he felt the deck shift again. Nowhere near as badly as the first time, but longer. What in blazes was going on?

“I’ll check the situation monitor,” he said, heading back to his office. The deck moved underneath him yet again. The doctor almost fell, but he made it to his computer. Nothing. Even intraship was down.

He returned to Chapel, who was preparing for casualties. Their first one came in barely a minute after the mysterious incident: Jacobs, a security guard, whose limp indicated to the doctor that he’d twisted his ankle.

McCoy hated being left in the dark. With Jim in command, he was accustomed to barging up onto the bridge whether he was needed or not, but with Lieutenant Sulu?

To hell with it. “Can you handle things, Nurse?”

She already had the hobbling Jacobs on one of the beds, and she nodded at McCoy, who headed out. Even though she’d never admit it, Christine was probably glad to get rid of him.

When Pavel Chekov was a teenager, he had been fascinated by the massive raised highways that crisscrossed Russia. Built in the twentieth century to support wheeled vehicles, they had become redundant with the invention of the hovercar and then the transporter. Yet no one had ever torn them down, and Chekov had hiked through the reclaimed countryside on six lanes of concrete no vehicle would drive again.

It made human endeavors seem pointless. The structures had outlasted the needs they were designed to fill. He doubted the inhabitants of Mu Arigulon V had designed this complex array of metal frameworks and roadbeds to support a diverse panoply of plant life.

“What do you think this is, sir?” asked Fatih Yüksel. The Turkish exobotanist was older than Chekov by several years. Chekov felt uncomfortable giving orders to someone who’d already been in Starfleet when he was still in elementary school.

“It looks like a support structure for a launch facility,” said Chekov. He gestured back behind them as they pushed their way through the bushes. “It reminds me of the old Plesetsk Cosmodrome. I am picking up tanks that must have once held some kind of fuel or reactant.”

“No spaceships.” Yüksel was scanning the area with his tricorder. When the Columbus landing party had split up, he had requested this part of the city, pointing out that it had the highest concentration of plant life. Chekov had been assigned to go with him.

“But was there ever a spaceship?” Chekov knew that for every planet that made it into space and made contact with the interstellar community, there was another whose space program had collapsed, preventing the inhabitants from discovering warp drive. “I want to get a closer look at the launch pad. Maybe the locals left the planet.”

“Well,” Yüksel said, “what I really want to get a look at is the flora ahead.” He pointed to where the bushes gave way to thick vines descending from the gantries above.

Chekov checked his tricorder. They were supposed to stay together, but the two locations were within a kilometer of one another. If anything happened, each would be able to come to the other’s aid. “Okay,” he said. “We will split up.” As the senior officer, it was his call to make.

The botanist smiled. “Good move, sir,” he said. “We’ll have this planet surveyed in no time.”

“Good luck, Mister Yüksel.” Chekov pushed off into the bushes. When he glanced over his shoulder, he saw the petty officer vanishing into the green draping vines. Shortly, the only sign of him was the rustling noise that was slowly fading away as they parted from one another.

Petty Officer Fatih Yüksel continued to push his way through the dull green flora. Bits of machinery he couldn’t identify lay unused and rusting, covered in what seemed like a moss. Let Chekov and the others try to figure out what had happened to the inhabitants; he was interested in what had taken their place. The plants in this area would have adapted to an urban environment over the past century, and would make a remarkable study.

The complex had been open once, but was now a tangled mass of plants. Yüksel was trying to reach its center, where his tricorder indicated a tree—the largest one in this area. He wanted to take a core sample that could be analyzed, revealing past climates and possibly indicating what had caused this planet to be abandoned.

He pushed his way through an overhanging set of vines and came upon a small building in the middle of the complex, about ten meters tall and four meters wide. This structure, like all the ones they’d seen from the Columbus, possessed no flat surfaces. With its irregular but continuous walls, it looked like something that had been grown. There were no obvious windows, and no door that he could recognize. But it was inside the building that his tricorder was picking up the tree’s signature, so he began to circle it. As he reached the other side, he discovered that a wall had crumbled in.

Or rather, had crumbled out. Within the building grew an enormous tree, similar to a Terran one but a dull green. It had no leaves, but sported fat, bulging buds all over its branches. One of its branches had extended past the confines of the building, knocking out part of the wall, through which Yüksel could barely make out the trunk.

Yüksel scrambled eagerly over the bits of wall between him and the alien tree and stepped inside. Everything was bathed in a light green glow. The roof had collapsed, allowing light to stream in. He had no idea what the structure had been designed for; now it was entirely occupied by this tree, which was two meters thick and taller than the building.

Yüksel realized that its base wasn’t on this level—the floor had a hole in it, through which the tree had grown. The standard site for taking a core sample was 1.3 meters up from the base, so he would need to get down into the lower area. There was a small gap between where the floor ended, torn and crumbled, and where the trunk began, but he couldn’t see down there—too dark.

Yüksel slung his backpack off his shoulders and pulled a flashlight out, shining it into the depths of the structure. The floor, he estimated, was two meters below; he could hang off the edge and drop. Determined to get his sample, he stowed his tricorder and tossed the backpack down first, followed by the flashlight, providing him enough of a view to know where to land. He carefully dangled himself over the edge and let go.

When he hit the floor, his foot hit a piece of rock, but he quickly regained his footing. Glad that he’d made it down unhurt, he recovered the flashlight and moved its beam around the room, a basement with large semicircular shapes set into the wall. But that wasn’t what interested him. Awed by the immense sight that was the alien tree in front of him, Yüksel grabbed the sampling kit out of his pack and began to activate the core sampler. He couldn’t wait to see what the results were. Preliminary meteorological analysis by Lieutenant Jaeger on the Hofstadter indicated a recent period of global warming, and that—

A scraping noise from behind Yüksel disrupted his concentration. What was that? An ancient piece of machinery coming to life?

He turned around, casting his flashlight in the direction of the sound. Nothing. What could have caused the noise?

He had heard something.

Yüksel dropped the sampling kit and unslung his tricorder. He continued to shine his light all across the room, but what had moments ago seemed mysterious and exciting was now gloomy and foreboding. Strange shadows crisscrossed his vision.

Something scraped again, behind him. Lanet olsun! He’d better call Chekov.

His hand reached for his communicator. Before he could activate it, there was a loud snap, and then something thick and flexible hit him in the back, like a giant whip.

It threw him off balance. Yüksel landed on his hands and knees, dropping his flashlight. He had no time to get up. Out of nowhere, a weight pressed down on his back. As its pressure increased, Yüksel was forced to take in smaller and smaller breaths. In moments, he was pinned to the floor.

The beam of his flashlight hit the wall, now useless.

McCoy had always been impressed by how calm the Enterprise’s bridge was, even in a crisis situation. When you had Jim Kirk in the command chair, with his nerves of steel, and Spock at his side, steady as a rock, there seemed to be no better choice than to follow their example.

This morning, the bridge was filled with chatter, with subdued conversations. Sulu was at the helm controls; a young woman in a command uniform, Lieutenant Rahda, was standing next to him. Crew members at the upper stations looked a little frantic. Sulu carefully adjusted controls on the console, trading information with Farrell at navigation. The ship rumbled again as they worked, causing Sulu to run his fingers over the controls.

McCoy stepped over to Lieutenant Uhura at communications. She was listening to reports on her earpiece and manipulating her own panel. Intraship was back up again, evidently. “Copy that, damage control. I’ll relay that information to Lieutenant Sulu.” She looked up as McCoy approached her and smiled, but didn’t say anything as she continued to handle all the requests coming through her board. “You’d better send that on to physics section, they’ll know what to do with it.”

He watched her work for a few more moments, then she pulled her earpiece out. “Hello, Doctor,” she said.

A number of message lights were still blinking. “Don’t you need to answer those?” McCoy asked.

“Part of being a good communications officer is knowing when not to answer,” she said, gesturing at the few lights that were still on, all of them amber. “I handled everything important. Those are low-priority.”

He smiled. “What’s the situation up here? We didn’t hear anything down in sickbay.”

“We’ve encountered a spatial distortion,” replied Uhura. “‘Run aground’ is what Lieutenant Rodriguez said. Subspace is too rough and unstable here for the ship to move through.”

McCoy spared a glance at the science station, where Rodriguez was writing notes on a data slate as he peered into the scope. “What about the shuttles?” he asked. “They didn’t hit this, did they?”

Uhura shook her head. “The captain reported that they reached Mu Arigulon early this morning with no problem.”

“Yet two days away, and we hit… something.” McCoy gestured vaguely toward the viewscreen, though this section of space looked no different than any other. The deck vibrated beneath him, but this time the sensation was barely noticeable.

“Gotcha!” Sulu’s triumphant cry drew McCoy’s eye back to the helm console, where the lieutenant was standing up. “She’s all yours, Lieutenant Rahda.”

The woman obligingly took her seat back. “All systems normal,” she reported. “We are maintaining position, one-point-oh-five light-years away from Mu Arigulon.”

“Situation report,” ordered Sulu as he settled back into the command chair, turning to face Rodriguez.

The lieutenant picked up his slate, peering at his notes. “The ship hit a spatial distortion,” he said. “A bump in space-time. It’s not been previously charted in this sector.”

“How large?” asked Sulu.

Rodriguez tapped on the slate nervously. “I’m not sure. I don’t detect anything other than what we just cleared—but then, we didn’t detect the distortion until we hit it. It’s very subtle.”

“It didn’t feel very subtle to me,” McCoy muttered to Uhura.

“Warp six was probably too fast under the circumstances,” said Sulu. He turned his chair to face Uhura. “Lieutenant?”

“Intraship’s functioning again, sir. Some static on the subspace channels, but that’s normal for this sector,” she said.

“Send a transmission to the shuttles, reporting what’s happened here. Advise that we are continuing toward Mu Ari at a reduced rate.” Uhura nodded and placed her earpiece back in position. Sulu turned his attention to McCoy for the first time. “Crew status, Doctor?”

“No casualties apart from a sprained ankle,” McCoy replied. “This ship’s had rougher rides.”

“That’s for sure,” said Sulu, turning to face the officer at the engineering subsystems station. His baby face made him look like he was fresh out of the Academy. “Damage report, Ensign Harper?”

“Nothing substantial,” the young man said. “There was that shipwide power outage when we first hit the distortion. Lieutenant DeSalle is investigating it right now. Other than that, all systems are now normal.”

Sulu nodded and turned back to face the viewscreen. “What speed would you recommend, Rodriguez?”

The science officer scribbled some calculations on his slate and checked the scope. “Warp four.”

Leaning forward, Sulu clapped his hands together. “Lay in a course for Mu Arigulon at warp four, Lieutenant Farrell.”

The navigator did as ordered. “ETA is five days, twenty-three hours, sir.”

“Take us forward, Lieutenant Rahda,” Sulu said. “Slow acceleration.”

As the ship began to hum with the power of the warp engines, McCoy moved forward to place his hands on the railing that circled the center of the bridge, leaning down over the command chair. “Listen,” he began, “are we going to… ‘run aground’ again?”

Sulu looked up and smiled. “Relax, Doctor. Everything should be fine. We’ll see it coming this time.” He seemed at ease, but McCoy didn’t buy his casual attitude. The helmsman had to be anxious about being in command of over four hundred people.

“Current speed?” Sulu asked.

“Warp three-point-five,” Rahda replied, her hand slowly pushing forward the speed control. “Everything—”

This time, as every light shut off, McCoy swore that he didn’t just feel the deck buckle, he felt it ripple, throwing him forward. He gripped the railing as hard as he could, keeping himself on his feet—but then a second ripple threw him backwards.

The doctor reeled and hit the communications console with his hip, only narrowly avoiding Uhura. He heard her cry out as she fell off her chair. McCoy reached out with his hand, hoping to catch her and help her back up.

Everything was suddenly dipped in blood red as the emergency lights came on. McCoy had always thought that color choice was unfortunate, but right now he didn’t give a damn. Now he could see. As he guided Uhura back to her seat, everything tilted sideways, sending both of them flying to port as they futilely held on to each other for support.

“Stabilize!” Sulu shouted.

“Working on it!” came Rahda’s voice at the exact same time that Farrell shouted, “Aye, sir!”

McCoy’s feet scrambled for purchase on the deck, and he almost had it—was almost safe—when the bridge recoiled, tilting the other way, knocking him straight onto the floor. Uhura managed to stumble back into her chair and grip her console.

The main lights switched on, and McCoy squinted until his eyes adjusted. Gravity was back to normal, as were the inertial dampers. The deck had stopped lurching. Most of the crew were resuming their positions, except for the young yeoman forward of Rodriguez. She’d somehow ended up clear on the opposite side of the bridge, clutching an unoccupied port station.

“That spatial distortion of yours has a helluva kick.” McCoy had trouble suppressing a pained groan. Damn, that had not been good for his back. He had to use the railing to pull himself up. “I don’t—”

“Doctor McCoy,” Uhura interrupted him, “sickbay is signaling. Nurse Chapel needs your assistance.”

“Tell her I’ll be right down.” He nodded at Sulu, but the lieutenant was only paying attention to Rodriguez, who was explaining something about spatial physics.

McCoy sprinted for the turbolift. In a crisis situation he knew where his place was. His patients came first.

As Montgomery Scott put on his silver EV suit, he remembered all the memos he’d sent to the quartermaster pointing out that if the things weren’t so damn uncomfortable, people wouldn’t complain so much about extravehicular work. He’d never received a reply.

This excursion had been his idea, and his alone. Nevertheless, that didn’t keep him from muttering under his breath while checking all the seals on the suit.

“Thanks, Doctor,” Scotty said as Doctor M’Benga handed him the large helmet he’d just pulled out of the storage unit of the shuttlecraft Hofstadter. The physician had made himself useful by helping Scotty get ready for the work awaiting him outside.

Scotty checked the shuttle’s force field. With the hatch open, the thin energy barrier would be the only thing keeping the air in. The force field was fully operational. Scotty fidgeted with his suit’s controls as the shuttle pulled closer to the satellite, checking the tether line.

He glanced over at Petty Officer Cron Emalra’ehn, the Deltan security guard who’d volunteered to go with him. Scotty was, quite frankly, gobsmacked by the man’s decision. “Are you sure you want to do this, laddie?”

“I like to get away from it all,” Emalra’ehn said. “Too much stuff in here, if you know what I mean.”

Scotty didn’t see how anyone could think that a G-class shuttle had too much stuff in it. On the other hand, he could understand wanting to get outside after four days of low-warp travel. “We’re almost there.” Scotty looked up toward the controls of the Hofstadter, where Spock was making final adjustments to the shuttle’s course. “Right, Mister Spock?”

“Correct.” Spock looked backward just for a moment. “I suggest you put your helmets on.”

Scotty lifted the bulky thing up over his head, and M’Benga helped him activate the seals. Everything checked out: he was ready to go.

Ready, yes, but not overly enthusiastic.

While this had been his idea, Scott found he didn’t want to go through with it. The actual step through the force field into free fall took a lot of gumption. He’d never been one for extreme sports like orbital skydiving.

Ah, sod it, he thought. There was no time to whine now.

“Velocity matched.” Spock’s voice sounded through the suit’s comm. “Ready?”

“Aye, sir.” Scotty nodded and tugged on the cable from his waist to the anchor point by the hatch. Emalra’ehn did the same.

“Opening hatch.”

The door swung up in front of the two men, revealing the expanse of stars—plus a small metal object only a few meters away. It was a satellite built by the missing inhabitants of Mu Arigulon V, one of a thousand orbiting the planet but no longer active. Antennas projected from the side of the sat, which was a cylinder a meter and a half tall and less than half a meter wide. A misshapen dish sat on top.

“Lieutenant Kologwe, please monitor their activity,” ordered Spock. The security officer, sitting in the seat nearest the door, turned on a tricorder.

“Time to go.” Scotty stepped forward, the atmospheric shield fizzling around him.

Simply being in zero gravity was always disorienting, but stepping into it was even more so. One second, Scotty was in a world with up, down, left, right; the next, there was nothing but the limited confines of his own suit. He was drifting slowly forward, carried by the momentum of his step over the shuttle’s threshold. Glancing to his right, he made out Emalra’ehn behind him.

The sat appeared motionless. However, Scotty knew that both the little metal ball and the shuttle were moving at 15,000 kilometers per hour relative to the planet, but with their velocities matched, it seemed like neither was moving.

Scott understood the mechanics of low gravity perfectly from a mathematical standpoint, but his stomach never had. While Spock and other scientists worked on the orbital survey, Scott wanted to study the alien satellites. However, Spock had not wanted to spare the shuttle’s limited sensor time to analyze them in detail. Scotty’s idea of bringing one on board so he could study it had been deemed an “adequate” solution. Effusive praise from the Vulcan science officer.

Scotty tapped some controls on his suit, causing its tiny thrusters to fire. Soon he was close enough to the satellite to touch it. Its purple metal surface was pitted by over a century of micrometeorite impacts but otherwise intact. Emalra’ehn had moved to the opposite side, all the while making sure that the tether didn’t get caught on one of the antenna spikes. After Scotty made a quick scan to verify that the satellite was inert, they moved to grab hold of it.

“Got it?” asked Scotty, keeping his eyes on the satellite to avoid vertigo.

Emalra’ehn, on the other hand, was glancing in every direction. “Yes, sir,” he said. “Pity to go back inside already. It’s nice to get out.”

Scotty raised an eyebrow. “Lieutenant Kologwe, bring us in.”

“Aye, Commander,” came her voice over the comm. The cables on Scotty and Emalra’ehn’s suits began to retract, reeling them over to the shuttle. Scotty let his eyes wander over the satellite, wondering what lay beneath its surface. Was it for communications? Scanning? Mapping? Or something more malevolent? Many early-spaceflight civilizations used satellites for housing rudimentary nuclear weapons.

Ah, well. He’d have enough time to speculate later. Taking great care not to lose himself in the infinity of space, he directed his gaze toward the small gray-green orb some Berengarian astronomer had christened “Mu Arigulon V.”

As they came within a meter of the shuttle, the comm came on again. “Stopping the cable.”

Scotty turned toward Emalra’ehn, but he moved his head too quickly. The stars began to spin. Cursing himself, he quickly focused on the satellite. “Fire your thrusters,” he said. They needed to slow the sat down.

Scotty and Emalra’ehn activated their thrusters at the same time, reducing their speed to a gentle drift just as they came within a meter of the hatch. Scotty steeled himself—as disorienting as it was to go from one g to zero g, the opposite was worse. Scott positioned his feet a few centimeters above the deck just before he felt the crackle of the atmospheric force field.

The sudden weight of the satellite caught him by surprise, and he almost lost his grip, but Kologwe was waiting to brace it from inside the shuttle. Emalra’ehn was fine, of course.

The three of them moved the satellite to the back of the shuttle as Doctor M’Benga resealed the door. The two scientists—Jaeger from geophysics and Saloniemi from archaeology and anthropology—looked up from their tricorders, but not for long. They had data from the sensor sweep to occupy their attention.

Scotty pulled off his helmet and slung it onto the deck of the shuttle. “Well, that was exciting.”

Emalra’ehn shrugged. “I’ve had better.”

As Scotty took off his suit, he gave silent thanks that he’d put yet another EVA behind him. Above all, the thing Scotty didn’t like about spacewalking was that it made him realize how small he was compared to the rest of the universe. It made him feel unimportant and useless. Unsettling, that.

Well, there was one good way to combat that feeling. Scott smiled at the thought of studying this piece of alien tech. The sooner he could figure out what this satellite was for, the better.

Lieutenant Commander Salvatore Giotto had to admit he’d been on more challenging missions. He wasn’t bored—and even if he had been, he would have had no right to complain, considering that he’d volunteered—but from a purely professional point of view, Mu Arigulon V was rapidly shaping up to be what security officers called a “haunted planet.”

Haunted planets had one big danger: the lack of excitement led you to become complacent and inattentive. As a junior officer on the Lantree, he had participated in a similar survey, only to be caught unawares by local predators that had gravely injured Captain Gees. With twenty additional years of experience, Giotto felt he was the perfect man to look after James Kirk. The captain could be a challenge. At least on this dirtball there was little chance of him getting into a fight with local aliens—if the scientists’ readings could be believed.

It paid to be wary of first results, another lesson bitterly learned. More than once, Giotto had witnessed how quickly a boring mission could turn into a deadly trap with little hope of escape. For a long time he’d kept the scars on his back to remind him of this, but he’d eventually realized how foolish it was and gotten rid of them.

The Columbus team was exploring the northeastern edge of a once-thriving metropolis. They’d split up—Giotto was with the captain and Ensign Seven Deers. He liked the engineer; nearly as old as Giotto, Seven Deers had raised two kids, making her more practical as well as more taciturn than other crew members.

He squinted in the bright light of the midday sun. The captain was picking out a path through the city, trying to take in as much of it as he could, occasionally asking Seven Deers what she thought the purpose of different structures might be. Giotto would have preferred point, but Captain Kirk would never allow it, so he followed behind, keeping his eyes open to assess where danger might arise.

Toothpick-like towers, barely wider than the Columbus was long, pierced the sky, their tops disappearing in the clouds. Ahead, the thin towers gave way to a squat building, round in general shape, but with many bulges on its outside, like a fat, warty toad. The road system was obviously designed around this mound.

“Ensign,” Captain Kirk began, “do you have any idea what those bulges are?”

Seven Deers looked up from her tricorder. “Dense machinery of some kind, Captain, but I can’t make out what. I’d like to get closer.”

“To do that,” Kirk said with a grin, “we’re going to have to figure out how to open the doors.”

Several large semicircles a little taller than Giotto were set into the ground floor of each building, but the landing party had yet to identify a way to open them. Without even knowing what these aliens had looked like, they couldn’t know how they opened their doors. The thing Giotto didn’t like about new species was that you had no idea how they thought, and if you didn’t know how they thought, you couldn’t anticipate what they were going to do.

“I have—” Seven Deers began to speak, but she was cut off by the chirp of their communicators.

They all reached for the devices, but Kirk had his out first, flipping its antenna grid up. “Kirk here.”

“Captain, there’s somethi—” Yüksel’s voice rang out, but something cut off the end of the transmission. All Giotto could discern was rising panic.

“Yüksel!” Kirk barked into the device. “Where are you? What’s happening?”

“—eneath the surfa—”

They waited expectantly for the signal to kick back in, but after a couple seconds, there was nothing but hissing static. Kirk looked to Giotto.

“He was with Ensign Chekov,” Giotto said, “in the northwest quadrant, sir.”

“Let’s go,” Kirk said, and immediately began moving at a quick jog, taking point. “Commander, keep trying to contact him.”

Giotto had already taken the rear and drawn his phaser; he flipped open his communicator. “Yüksel, do you read me?” he called. “Yüksel!” There was only static.

Kirk was continuing to give orders. “Get a fix on that signal, Ensign!” he called to Seven Deers, who was between the two men. “I want to know exactly where he is.” He held his communicator up again. “Kirk to Chekov.”

A moment passed while Giotto considered what could have happened to the exobotanist. On this planet for only four hours and already—

“Chekov here, sir.”

“Ensign, where’s your teammate?”

“He was off looking at some plant life, sir.”

“You split up?” Kirk sounded incredulous.

Giotto’s anger was rising. What had they been thinking? You could expect a bit of airheadedness from a scientist like Yüksel, but not from an officer like Chekov. He continued to call for the specialist into his communicator.

“Did you get that transmission?” Kirk was asking. “He was obviously hit by something.”

“Yes, sir.” There was a small pause. “We thought it made sense to cover a greater area. We were exploring a launching complex of some kind. I will meet you where we split up, sir.”

“You do that, Mister Chekov,” Kirk said, snapping his communicator shut. He fell back to draw even with Giotto. “Commander, contact Rawlins and Tra. Make sure they’re safe.”

Giotto switched channels. “Aye, sir.” Kirk sped up to exchange some words with Seven Deers about tracking Yüksel’s signal as Giotto made contact. “Giotto to Tra.”

There were a few moments of silence. “Tra here.” The security guard sounded fine.

“Crewman, did you receive Yüksel’s signal?”

“Yes, Commander. Rawlins and I are fine; we’re looking at what we think is graffiti.”

“What’s your location?”

“We’re in the southeast quadrant of the city. There are a lot of small buildings.”

“We’re converging in the northwest area to look for him. I’ll send you the coordinates. Keep your eyes open.” They didn’t need more people to go missing.

“Always do, sir. Tra out.”

Giotto slipped the communicator back onto his belt. Tra would keep Rawlins safe.

“How are they, Commander?” Kirk yelled over his shoulder, having taken point again.

“They’re fine, sir.”

“Good.”

In his early days on the Enterprise, Giotto had had great difficulty getting used to Kirk’s command style. It was nothing like how things had been done on the Lantree. Captain Gees had always brought his security chief with him on landing parties, and when there had been fighting to do, Giotto or Commander Mauracher, the executive officer, had handled it.

It was difficult to say exactly why Kirk was so different. It could simply be that Gees was an older man, but there was more to it. The captain felt he couldn’t ask his men to place themselves in danger unless he did the same himself. Sometimes, Giotto thought there must be some underlying issue, but he had to admit that Kirk’s style got results. The captain always got the job done.

Giotto regularly walked the path of danger; it was difficult to complain about getting shot at when you put on the red shirt. It went with the territory.