Allegiance in Exile Page 5

  “The captain’s not asking for an answer, Ensign,” the doctor said. “He’s looking for intuition.” Trinh looked to Captain Kirk for confirmation.

  “Mister Spock has little taste for speculation,” he said. He lifted both his eyebrows in an expression that seemed to say, That’s all well and good, but— “I find that speculation makes for a nice snack every now and then.”

  Trinh understood the first officer’s preference to avoid conjecture. Given her chosen fields, Trinh had considered numerous explanations for the things she’d seen since transporting down from the ship, but she too resisted drawing any conclusions until she had collected compelling evidence to lead her to one. “There are several questions I think we can ask here,” she told Captain Kirk. “Who are the people who once called this city home? Are they native to this world? Regardless, what became of them? Did they perish along with this place, or did they abandon it prior to its demise, and if they deserted it, then where are they now? And for me—” Trinh looked away from the captain for a moment and eyed their surroundings. “—perhaps the question of greatest import is the one you asked a few minutes ago: what happened here?”

  Once again, Trinh saw the side of the captain’s mouth curl up in a look that didn’t quite rise to the level of a smile. “I asked for speculation, Ensign,” he said. “All you gave me were questions.”

  “You’ve only been aboard a month,” Doctor McCoy said, with no hesitation in his broad smile, “and yet Spock’s got you trained already.”

  Trinh looked at the doctor, then back at the captain. Despite their obvious good humor, she realized that she had just failed to provide her commanding officer with what he’d requested of her. Although she thought that the moment had passed, she decided to try again anyway. “Ağdam,” she said.

  “What?” the doctor asked, but Trinh kept her attention focused on Captain Kirk.

  “Ağdam,” she repeated. “You asked for my intuition, sir,” Trinh said. “This city puts me in mind of Ağdam.”

  “What the devil is Ağdam?” asked Doctor McCoy, a reaction Trinh had more or less expected. Before she could respond, though, the captain spoke up.

  “Ağdam was a village in the Republic of Azerbaijan, in the Caucasus on Earth,” he said, his voice low and even. “In the late twentieth century, forces of the Artsakh Republic assaulted the town, causing its entire population to flee. Once the natives had abandoned their home, the attackers chose to destroy what remained of Ağdam in order to prevent its recapture.”

  “Yes,” Trinh said, impressed by Captain Kirk’s knowledge of history. “It existed for several decades after that as a buffer zone between military factions, and subsequently as little more than a ghost town.”

  “I see,” Doctor McCoy said, his earlier smile replaced by a sober mien. The three officers stood together quietly for a moment, saying nothing more.

  At last, Commander Spock announced Lieutenant Kyle’s readiness to beam them to their next location. The captain acknowledged him, then stepped to one side, where every member of the landing party took up a position beside him approximating the format of the transporter stage aboard ship. Raising his communicator once more, the captain said, “Kirk to transporter room. Mister Kyle, energize.”

  And in the next moment, the latest version of Mai Duyen Trinh disappeared.

  • • •

  The landing party materialized in darkness, which Trinh found unnerving. With her last thoughts before beaming away from the city about becoming yet another new iteration of herself, her sudden awareness in a lightless environment made her question her existence. At the very least, she feared that something had gone terribly wrong with the transporter—maybe even that it had reassembled her body within solid rock. She opened her mouth to disprove the possibility, and to confirm the presence of the other members of the landing party about her, but instead, she found herself choking back a scream.

  Calm down, she thought, and not kindly. She rebuked herself for having such a strong emotional reaction. She considered that perhaps she actually might learn something of value—something beyond science, beyond her duties aboard Enterprise—from the quite Vulcan Commander Spock.

  Although Trinh had time for those thoughts to cycle through her mind, only a few seconds passed before a light bloomed in the darkness. Set on a tripod a meter or so high, the lighting panel glowed dimly at first, before intensifying to its full output, allowing the eyes of the landing party personnel to adjust easily. It illuminated the uneven, rocky patch of ground beneath it, as well as the six Enterprise crew members, but little else.

  Captain Kirk turned and surveyed the landing party, as though to ensure that everybody had materialized safely. He then stepped over to the tripod, bent down, and retrieved one of a half-dozen handheld beacons sitting beside it. Even as Commander Spock and Doctor McCoy and the two security officers also moved in that direction, the captain said, “Everybody take one.” Trinh suspected that he issued the order strictly for her benefit, owing to her relative newness aboard ship and her inexperience with planetary missions. The transport from Enterprise of the lighting panel and the beacons must have fallen into the category of standard procedure when beaming members of the crew into a dark environment, a likelihood not only because of its good sense, but borne out by the speedy reactions of the others.

  As Trinh reached the tripod, Doctor McCoy handed her the last of the beacons. She thanked him with a nod. She felt cold, and noted that the fog of her breath seemed denser and lingered a bit longer than it had out in the city square. A deeper chill permeated the setting, though the stagnant air tasted stale.

  As the members of the landing party clipped their beacons around their wrists and switched them on, Trinh did so as well, then turned to follow the lead of the captain. She saw him shine his beam upward, and so she peered in that direction. Far above them—though in the surrounding black, Trinh had difficulty estimating just how far above them—hung the roof of the cave. She noticed no reflective spots that would have indicated moisture, the dry character of the underground cavity also demonstrated by the lack of stalactites hanging down.

  The captain lowered his beacon, and its beam—and several others—reached out horizontally to the cave walls a good distance away. Trinh perceived the considerable size of the chamber, and she turned around to check its dimension in the opposite direction. The bright white cone of light from her beacon settled not on the irregular surface of a cave wall, though, but on a surprisingly smooth surface. Trinh ran her beam up and down, left and right, and saw numerous flat surfaces connected together to form what looked like the hull of a vessel several times the size of a shuttlecraft. “Captain,” she called at once.

  She heard the scrape of boots along the cave floor as the others joined her, the beams of their beacons mingling with hers to better illuminate the ship. It had a bronze-colored finish, though she supposed that could have been the result of an accumulation of dust settling on it through the years—or through the decades, or the centuries. It tapered from a wide end aft to a smaller, blunt nose at the front, where several murky ports peered out like unseeing eyes. It rested upon a pair of abbreviated nacelles that depended amidships, one on either side of the craft.

  With the additional beacons, Trinh had a better opportunity to study the details of the vessel. She saw that layers of dirt did indeed coat its surface, and also that it had undergone a physical assault: dents, many quite deep, littered its hull, and in one place, a fracture traced a jagged path up toward the overhead. Likewise, several fissures had compromised the engine structures.

  “Spock,” said the captain from beside Trinh. “Can you identify it?”

  “The design is unfamiliar,” said the first officer. “As are these markings.” Trinh peered at the various circles of light on the hull, until she saw one centered on a row of complex, blocklike ideograms. She recognized the flavor of the written language—in her archaeological work, she’d run across similar sorts of characters—but not
its particulars.

  “Ensign Trinh?” the captain asked as the whine of Commander Spock’s tricorder rose in the chamber, its usually piercing tone somehow rendered thinner in the huge cavern.

  “The type of writing is familiar,” she said, “but not its content. It appears ideogrammic, but we can infer very little from that about the people who used the language.”

  “Captain,” said Commander Spock, “the nacelles encase warp engines, but they are inert. They appear to have been drained of antimatter. The entire vessel is completely without power.”

  “I don’t think it matters, Spock,” said Captain Kirk. “Even if it had power, the ship doesn’t look spaceworthy.”

  “Sir,” called out one of the security guards, Crewman Lemli, from where he’d circled around the bow of the vessel. “There’s a hatch open on this side.”

  Captain Kirk peered over at Commander Spock with an inquisitive look, and then the two headed around the front end of the vessel. Trinh and the others did so as well. They stopped two-thirds of the way to the stern, where Crewman Lemli held the beam of his beacon on a wide, rectangular opening in the hull. On the far bulkhead, Trinh saw, panels had been ripped out and the circuitry within smashed.

  “Spock? Bones?” the captain said, and both men immediately began working their tricorders. Trinh noticed how few words Captain Kirk needed to convey his orders to his exec and chief medical officer. The men had clearly worked together for a long time.

  “I detect nothing dangerous within the vessel,” said Commander Spock. “It should be safe to board.”

  “I’m reading some minute biological matter,” reported Doctor McCoy. “Epithelial cells, strands of hair . . . the sort of residual physical detritus likely left by whatever beings used the ship.”

  “Can you tell anything about them from your scans?” the captain asked.

  “Only that they had skin and hair,” the doctor said. “I’ll need to take samples to determine if I can extract any DNA and sequence it. Depending on the age of the biological material—and it seems like all this happened a very long time ago—I may not have much success.”

  Doctor McCoy’s words—it seems like all this happened a very long time ago—resonated with Trinh. So much of her work, at least on the archaeological side, involved civilizations lost centuries or even millennia in the past. She had spent much of her career sifting through the vestiges of societies unknown to the modern age, in places that had turned to ash.

  Like the city on this world, she thought. Except that she had made no effort to date the ruins during the few minutes that the landing party had walked through the community square. Such tasks typically came later, at the time of site excavation and the collection of artifacts. With only a single, isolated set of ruins, though, Trinh lacked a frame of reference for the people who had built, lived in, and possibly perished in the city. Any attempt to pinpoint the era when they had resided there would require an absolute technique, such as radiogenic dating, which would in turn necessitate studying the planet’s atmosphere and geology, as well as the output of cosmic rays by its star.

  Unless, Trinh thought as a hunch grew in her mind. She knew the luminosity and spectral classification of system R-775’s sun, and the Class-M status of its lone terrestrial world. Those general facts would narrow the parameters for radiogenic dating. Especially if—

  The captain had spoken of the value of intuition, and so Trinh decided to act on hers. She worked the controls of her tricorder, recalling the data from the scans she had accumulated from the broken pieces of the statue in the square. In addition to their geometric shapes, the tricorder had recorded their composition, which Trinh began to analyze.

  As she initiated several different programs, she heard the ring of an impact against metal. Trinh looked up to see that Captain Kirk had stepped onto the nacelle of the alien spacecraft. She also observed that, despite his first officer’s assurance of safety within the vessel’s interior, he had drawn his phaser. Still, even with the caution he demonstrated, he hadn’t required either of the security guards to enter the cabin before him.

  After Captain Kirk entered the vessel, Commander Spock trailed him inside. The doctor moved to follow, but then turned and held out a hand toward Trinh. “Ensign?” he said.

  Realizing that Doctor McCoy expected her to enter the ship as well, Trinh walked to the open hatch. Though she declined to take his hand, she climbed up onto the nacelle and then into the alien vessel. The doctor stepped inside after her.

  Trinh peered to her left, shining her beacon toward the stern of the ship. Just as she’d already seen across from the hatch, control panels in a rear bulkhead had been shattered, and their internal circuitry spilled out onto the deck and destroyed. Spatters of silver covered the deck there, as though some of the metal within the ship had melted under great heat. The implied violence felt palpable.

  Gazing to her left, Trinh saw rows of empty seats marching along on both sides of a central aisle. Near the bow, another hatch stood open. Beyond it, visible in the combined glow of several beacons, more consoles had been demolished.

  “Looks to me like somebody didn’t want this ship going anywhere,” offered Doctor McCoy.

  “Despite the obvious paucity of our knowledge about precisely what transpired here, and under what circumstances,” said the first officer, “I am forced to agree with Doctor McCoy.”

  “Really, Spock?” asked the doctor. “I thought that Vulcans practiced logic, not common sense.” The lilt in his voice betrayed his lack of seriousness.

  “For all our sakes,” Commander Spock replied, “I can only hope that your actual use of sense, Doctor, grows more common.” The comment, filled with unconcealed sarcasm, startled Trinh. Not only had she never heard the first officer joke in such a way—or in any way—but the familiarity with which the two men delivered their exchange told her that they had sparred in such a manner before, and likely on many occasions.

  “Bones, collect whatever biological samples you can,” the captain said, apparently ignoring the byplay. “Spock, I want you to see if there’s anything at all intact in this vessel, and to learn whatever you can about the level of technology in use here.” After both men acknowledged their orders, Captain Kirk turned to address Trinh. “Ensign,” he began, but then her tricorder emitted a two-toned signal.

  Trinh looked down at the device’s display and saw that the analysis she’d run had completed. She quickly glanced through the readout until she spied the information she sought. It did not surprise her to see that her instincts had been correct. “Captain,” she said, “it occurred to me that I could execute a series of rough radiogenic dating routines on the pieces of the sculpture we saw in the city square. Fortunately, the statue was formed from the equivalent of cultured marble, meaning that it contained synthetic resins, which I was able to date.”

  “How accurate would such a process be?” the captain asked.

  “Depending upon the age of a particular artifact and various other factors, the margin for error could reach into the thousands of years,” Trinh said. “In this case, though, the estimate is considerably more exacting than that.”

  “Spock, the ensign’s already starting to sound like you,” said the doctor.

  “Bones,” Captain Kirk said, clearly admonishing the doctor, and then, “How old is the statue?”

  “The material it’s composed of was manufactured within the last year,” Trinh said.

  “What?” Doctor McCoy said, his voice rising. “That means . . .” He didn’t finish his statement, but the captain did.

  “It means that the city was only just destroyed,” he said.

  Three

  In the distance, the gray-white form of an Enterprise shuttlecraft banked to port above the planet and began its descent to the surface. Beyond Mitrios, the curve of the alien orb shined in denial of the depthless night of space. Through the viewports of da Gama, the shuttle he piloted, Sulu allowed himself a moment to appreciate the beauty of the
scene unspooling before him: a living world rising like a paradisiacal way station along mankind’s journey through the mostly barren universe, and a small ship carrying some of his crewmates to that world on their continuing quest for knowledge.

  As Mitrios descended toward the cloud cover, Sulu raised his hands to the main console and tapped at the controls to execute da Gama’s own voyage to the surface. “Beginning our trip down,” he announced.

  “Acknowledged,” said Lieutenant Hadley, Enterprise’s third-shift navigator. Sitting beside Sulu at the main panel, he touched a button, which chirped in response. “Approach vector set.”

  Outside the ports, the gleaming disk of the planet seemed to reel around and then grow larger. Sulu lost sight of Mitrios somewhere ahead. The cabin jolted mildly as the hull came into contact with the atmosphere. A gauge showed the increasing pull of the planet’s gravitational field as da Gama streaked downward, and Sulu verified that the shuttle’s artificial gravity net adapted appropriately.

  As da Gama dropped through the sky, Sulu glanced back over his shoulder at the other six members of the team he led. After transporting down to the planet himself, Captain Kirk had returned to the ship with more questions than answers. Once back aboard, the captain consulted with his senior officers about how best to proceed. Guided by Mister Spock and Doctor McCoy, Enterprise’s command staff reached an easy consensus: send a scientific contingent to the planet, both to perform the regular research and analysis on an unexplored world, and to learn as much as possible about the ruined city there.

  Sulu and his fellow senior officers had all reviewed the reports of the initial landing party the captain had taken down to the planet. Most agreed that whoever had constructed the city had come from another world; the singular nature of the settlement pointed to that conclusion, and the discovery on the surface of several warp-capable ships—all of them battered and rendered inoperative—seemed to support that view. Opinions divided, though, on what had taken place after the city had been built. Some, including Captain Kirk, believed that the city had been attacked from without; others thought that the inhabitants had fought among themselves. Still others envisioned a natural catastrophe, and some, a calamity brought about by scientific or military experimentation.