Allegiance in Exile Read online

  More than any other possibility, that of an external attack concerned the captain. Starfleet had scheduled Enterprise to explore that region of space over the course of the following six months, and it certainly mattered if a hostile alien species already claimed those sectors as their own. The expeditions, sent down to the planet aboard the shuttles Mitrios, da Gama, and Christopher, would focus on determining just what had befallen the city.

  Peering back at the shuttlecraft’s main cabin, Sulu checked on the rest of his landing party. Along with Hadley, a security guard and five of the ship’s scientists had been assigned to da Gama. The team included Veldaclien ch’Gorin, an archaeologist and one of the few Andorians serving aboard Enterprise. Under his tutelage, Sulu had recently begun learning vershaan, a martial art invented and practiced as sport on Andoria.

  Sulu knew all but one member of the landing party. The ship’s new A-and-A officer had joined the crew only recently, and he’d seen her around Enterprise on only a couple of occasions. Until her detail to da Gama, he’d never even spoken to her.

  As Sulu glanced at the crew members he had been chosen to lead down to the planet, he saw Ensign Mai Duyen Trinh studying the readout of her tricorder. Petite, she stood not much more than a meter and a half tall. She had dark brown eyes, and her black hair hung down to just below the line of her jaw, framing her face the way a pair of quotation marks frame a sentence.

  Lifting her gaze from her tricorder, the ensign saw Sulu peering in her direction. She offered him a tight-lipped smile, perfunctory and professional. Sulu nodded, then turned back to the main console.

  The helmsman checked his display, then looked out again through the front viewports. He studied the highest layer of clouds and trimmed the shuttlecraft as it approached the troposphere. The bow bobbed up and the cabin leveled as da Gama continued toward the surface.

  As the shuttle broke through the cloud cover, Sulu beheld for the first time what had once been an alien city. From above, it looked as though it had been flattened, as though a tremendous force had pressed down all at once, splintering buildings and toppling them in pieces to the ground. He could not imagine the terrible end the inhabitants must have suffered.

  Nothing at all moved among the wreckage, underscoring the lifelessness of the tableau. Struck by the grimness of the static, crumbled place, Sulu could not look away. As da Gama flew toward the square at the center of the city, though, he caught sight of Mitrios, just ahead of and below da Gama. As Sulu watched, the lead shuttle rolled to starboard, off toward the northwest. The three Enterprise shuttlecraft would each alight at different points around the outskirts of the city, allowing the three landing parties to spread out their investigations. A fourth team would transport down to the community square and study it in detail.

  At the point where da Gama tracked over the city center, Sulu pulled the shuttle around to port. A wooded area stretched away from the city along its southern edge, leading westward almost all the way to a deep canyon of considerable extent. The mission briefing had mentioned the natural formation, which reached several kilometers across and stretched for hundreds more along the surface.

  Sulu eyed a clearing in the trees near the southwest corner of the city, the location that had been chosen for him to set down. While the scientists of his landing party would enter the city from that direction, he and Hadley would make their way to the cavern where the first alien spacecraft had been found. The third shuttle, Christopher, would land east of the city, not far from where the remains of several other ships had been located aboveground, although those had been left far less intact than the one Captain Kirk and his team had discovered.

  “I’m reading the clearing just beyond the city,” reported Hadley. He pressed a button, then twisted a wide control knob. “Making a minor correction to our projected course,” Hadley said. “Our landing trajectory is set.”

  Sulu prepared for the switchover from thrusters to the antigrav generators that would take the shuttle to touchdown. He also checked the internal gravity net to ensure its continuing operation. “Taking us onto our final approach,” he said.

  As da Gama slowed its forward momentum and settled downward, the vast canyon disappeared from view behind the line of tall pine trees that bordered the clearing. The shuttle touched down gently. Through the front ports, Sulu saw a field of dark soil, punctuated by clusters of yellowish grass.

  “Contact by all landing pads,” Hadley confirmed. “Shutting down the antigrav generators.” He worked his side of the control panel, while Sulu saw to his own responsibilities.

  “Shutting down the thrusters,” the helmsman said. “Taking the engines off line.” The low hum that enveloped the cabin since it had powered up in Enterprise’s hangar bay diminished until it faded into silence.

  Hadley touched a final button. “Main console is secure,” he said.

  Sulu nodded to Hadley, then turned in his chair to face the rest of the landing party. “The city lies just north of our location,” he told the group. “Lieutenant Josephs—” Sulu motioned to the rear starboard seat, where an officer in red stood up and regarded the others. “—will stay with the shuttlecraft. Check in with him every two hours. You’ll have eight hours on the surface before we return to the Enterprise.” Captain Kirk had made it clear that he wanted none of the crew on the surface past nightfall. They would have at least three days to make sense of what they’d found in system R-775, though the captain had indicated to the command crew that some leeway existed in the ship’s schedule should they not find satisfactory answers in that time.

  The scientists all voiced their understanding, then rose from their seats, some of them moving into the shuttle’s rear compartment, where they had stowed various equipment. Sulu stood up as well and moved to the hatch, which he opened with a touch to the control panel set into the bulkhead beside it. The trapezoidal doors split and withdrew left and right into the bulkhead with a whoosh, while the panel below them folded outward to form a ramp across the portside engine nacelle. A warm, dry breeze wafted into the cabin. The surface temperature had risen since the captain had brought the first landing party down to the planet, and as the scientists filed to the hatch of da Gama, none of them donned the field jackets they’d brought with them.

  Once all of the scientists had exited the shuttle, some of them hauling their equipment on antigravs, Sulu turned to the security guard. “You ready for your watch, Mitch?” he asked. They had known each other for three years, since Lieutenant Josephs had first transferred to Enterprise from space station KR-1.

  The tall, broad-chested officer moved toward the bow of the shuttle. Holding up the tricorder in his hand, he said, “I’ve got two new collections to help me pass the time.” A xenophilatelist, he had introduced Sulu to the pastime a while back. The helmsman had enjoyed learning about and searching for extant examples of alien postal stamps, but shortly after he’d taken up the hobby, he’d developed an interest in genealogy, which quickly grew to consume many of his off-duty hours.

  “Anything interesting?” Sulu asked. He paced toward the aft end of the shuttle, peering back over his shoulder as Josephs responded.

  “Somebody on Berengaria claims to have a four-hundred-year-old double-printed Andorian Presider stamp,” he said.

  “I thought that was a fabrication,” Sulu said. He remembered reading that, when an Andorian collector had first produced an example of such a misprinted stamp several decades earlier, it had been unmasked as a forgery.

  “Everybody thought he not only faked the stamp,” Josephs said, “but even the story about the erroneous creation of such a stamp.” The security officer shrugged. “I still think it’s all a hoax, but I’m interested to see what sort of proof this Berengarian purports to have.”

  Sulu moved through the archway at the rear of the main cabin and into the shuttle’s rear compartment. Skirting the remaining scientific equipment, he withdrew from a locker there a tricorder and a portable engineering kit, along with his and Hadle
y’s field jackets. Although the current weather seemed temperate, he’d been warned that the interior of the cave would likely feel considerably cooler. He started back through the arch and toward the front of the cabin. “You’ll have to let me know whether or not the Presider stamp turns out to be legitimate,” Sulu told Josephs.

  “I will,” said the security officer. When Sulu handed Hadley his jacket, Josephs leaned in and glanced at the shuttle’s main console. “I’ll expect you two to check in by twelve-eleven hours,” he said.

  “Will do,” Sulu said. Then, of Hadley, he asked, “Are you ready, Bill?”

  “Let’s go,” said the navigator.

  Sulu led the way outside. Ahead of them, the scientists made their way across the clearing toward the edge of the city, pulling their equipment on antigrav sledges that floated along behind them. Sulu started after them, with Hadley at his side. Once the two reached the city, they would cut west, toward the canyon, to where the damaged alien spacecraft sat in a subterranean chamber. While another team investigated the vessels found east of the city, Sulu and Hadley would study the ship that the first landing party had found. Captain Kirk hoped that one or the other of the groups would learn something meaningful from the vessels; in particular, he sought to learn the identity and origin of those who’d flown the ships to the planet in the first place. Sulu would bring to bear not only his experience at the helm of a starship, but also his training as a mathematician. In addition to Bill Hadley’s position as a navigator, he also held an A5 computer journeyman classification, one of the highest such ratings among the Enterprise crew. Armed with their various levels of expertise, they would do their best to coax some information out of the ruined spacecraft.

  Sulu heard a hum behind him. He glanced back in time to see da Gama’s hatch fold closed. Then he turned back around and continued with Hadley toward the city. Sulu had no way of knowing that he would never board the shuttle again.

  • • •

  Sulu reached up and dragged his bare arm across his forehead, wiping away the sweat that had formed there. Reports of the chilly environment within the cave had been accurate, but after Sulu and Hadley had worked for some time inside the alien spacecraft, their physical efforts had combined with the enclosed space to create an oppressively stuffy atmosphere. They had peeled off their jackets first, and then later had pushed up the sleeves of their gold uniform shirts.

  In front of him, bathed in the glow of four lighting panels that the Enterprise crew had beamed down, Hadley lay prone on the deck of the alien vessel, his arms and head buried inside its inner workings. They had just succeeded in prying off an access plate, below which sat several complex systems. According to the sensor scans they’d executed with their tricorder, those systems remained intact.

  That’ll be a first, Sulu thought. He and Hadley had scoured both the exterior and the interior of the vessel. Though the drive components had been compromised, they explored the possibility of reintroducing antimatter into the engines in order to establish a minimal level of power. When simulations to do so failed, they investigated the ship’s backup batteries, wondering if they could recharge or even replace them. When even that scheme proved unworkable, they moved inside.

  There, Sulu and Hadley had begun their efforts by searching for any equipment even remotely whole, without success. They then changed tack and pored over the remnants of the smashed control panels, recording symbols in an attempt to decipher the language in which they had been written. They attempted to link their tricorder up to the few existing computer pathways recognizable as such, hoping to secure access to any intermediate memory caches. Nothing worked.

  At last, they’d taken to dismantling the vessel. Sulu and Hadley scanned the bulkheads, the overhead, and the decking, mapping the internal apparatus. Many had been disabled, their circuitry evidently overloaded by something akin to a high-wattage pulse. The vessel’s deflector screens, shields, and weapons had all been compromised. Finally, though, Sulu and Hadley detected three unbroken systems: artificial gravity, atmospheric recycling, and temperature control. They didn’t expect to find hiding within those systems an anatomy text describing the aliens, or an interstellar map pointing the way to their native planet, but even the subtlest of clues might suggest what had taken place there, and who had been involved. Although Starfleet had never before explored R-775, that didn’t necessarily mean that the Klingons—or the Tholians or some other species already known to the Federation—hadn’t done so. As Captain Kirk had pointed out, with the Enterprise crew set to survey that region of space over the course of the next half year, it would pay to know sooner rather than later who else traveled those skies—particularly if they were capable—militarily and morally—of laying waste to a populated city.

  “It won’t work,” Hadley called from where he’d lowered his head and hands into the guts of the alien ship. His voice reverberated in the narrow space. Hadley pulled his arms from below the deck, and Sulu reached down to help him scamper all of the way back out.

  Hadley removed the beacon from his bare wrist and dropped it to the deck without even switching it off. He took in a deep breath, then let it out slowly, his cheeks puffing in the process. “It won’t work,” he said again. “There’s just no way to get at the power conduits.” Their intention had been to run their own supply of energy through the undamaged systems, record their output, then search for any embedded firmware. The force of the artificial gravity net, the composition of the reprocessed atmosphere, and the temperature settings all could tell the Enterprise crew something more about the aliens—especially if they turned out to be a species familiar to the Federation. Sulu found that possibility unlikely, though, given the unfamiliar design of the ship.

  Hadley pushed himself backward on the deck until he could sit back against a bulkhead. Sulu stood back up and peered down at him. “What if we remove the systems?”

  Hadley chuckled. “Yeah, I thought of that too,” he said. “I think that’s what we’ll have to do.” He gazed down at the open panel from which he’d just extracted himself. “We’re going to have to rip up the whole deck.”

  “Using a phaser torch?” Sulu asked.

  “I’m not sure what else we could use that would do the trick,” Hadley said.

  “Right,” Sulu agreed. “As though it’s not hot enough in here already.” In response, Hadley looked around and found one of the metal water bottles they’d transported down from Enterprise. He upended it and took a long pull. “What do you say we take a break? We can walk back to the shuttle and get some lunch.”

  Hadley shook his head. “You know, I’m not even hungry right now,” he said. “I’d just like to sit here, or maybe out in the cave where it’s cooler. I just want to sip my water and not think about anything for a half hour or so.”

  “We can transport back up to the ship and take a breather there,” Sulu suggested.

  Hadley seemed to consider this, but then shook his head again. “Nah, that’s all right. I’ll probably get my second wind before too long.”

  Sulu reached over to one of the nearby seats and picked up the tricorder he’d set there. He checked the chronometer and saw that they’d been working on the alien ship for nearly four hours. “We’re coming up on our next check-in with da Gama,” he said. “I think I’ll stretch my legs and head back to the shuttle, get a report from Josephs on the progress of the scientists. And I am hungry, so I’ll get some lunch too.”

  “All right,” Hadley said. “I’ll contact engineering and have them send down a phaser torch.”

  “Good,” Sulu said. He draped the strap of the tricorder across one shoulder, then retrieved his communicator and phaser from where he’d set them aside while working. “I shouldn’t be much more than an hour or so.” The walk from da Gama, through the corner of the city, out to the cavern had taken only about fifteen minutes, and Sulu didn’t intend to spend more than half an hour at the shuttle.

  Sulu started for the outer hatch. Before heading out
into the cave, he peered back at Hadley. “If the aliens show up while I’m gone,” he said, “just let them have their ship back.”

  “What if the aliens who destroyed the ship show up?” Hadley asked in mock seriousness.

  Sulu shrugged. “Then say hello for me,” he said.

  Hadley smiled. “How about I just have them wait for you to get back so you can tell them yourself?”

  “You’re so thoughtful,” Sulu told him. He stepped down onto the engine nacelle, and then down to the cave floor. He activated the beacon attached to his wrist, then marched toward the shaft that led up to the surface.

  Sulu had already trod at least a hundred meters when the coolness of the cavern overcame the heat of his earlier exertions. He considered going back for his field jacket, but decided against it, instead simply rolling his uniform sleeves back down. He reached the mouth of the cave just two minutes later.

  The city lay directly ahead, with the woods abutting it to the right. Sulu thought about trying a more direct route back to the shuttle, through the trees, but he had no idea how the footing would be there, or how passable the vegetation. Instead, he tramped back the way he’d come.

  As he walked along the city’s edge, tracing his way through the hulking mounds of fallen buildings, Sulu found the experience different than he had earlier. He and Hadley had held a conversation while making their way to the cave, but traveling alone along the same path, he heard only the rap of his own footsteps, the susurrus of his own breathing. Those sounds seemed somehow disrespectful, as though an intrusion on the memories of so many who had likely died there.

  Sulu quickened his step. He reached the clearing in only twelve minutes. Although he didn’t enter it with a sigh of relief, the disquiet he’d felt dissipated. His ease of mind did not last long.