Star Trek: The Rings of Time (5 page)

She scowled, then let out an exasperated sigh. “What the hell. Far be it from me to be the spoilsport who kept mankind from going to Saturn. If you two are willing to put up with this juvenile idiot for more than two billion kilometers, you can count on me to back you up with Mission Control. But don’t think I’m happy about it.” She glared at Zoe. “If it was up to me, you’d
be in a maximum-security prison cell as fast as we could turn this boat around.”

“You may get your wish eventually,” Zoe conceded. “If it’s any consolation.”

“Not really.” Fontana gave Shaun a rueful look. “I really hope you know what you’re doing, Shaun.”

Me, too,
he thought.

2270

“Klondike VI directly ahead, sir.”

“Slow to impulse, Mr. Sulu,” Kirk instructed, relieved to have reached their destination at last. The
Enterprise
had made good time getting there, but nineteen long days had passed since they had first received word of the crisis facing the mining colony. A yeoman offered him a cup of hot coffee, which he accepted gratefully. He leaned forward in his chair. “Let’s see where we are.”

The planet appeared on the viewscreen. Kirk was struck by its resemblance to Saturn. The stormy cloud belts striping its upper atmosphere were perhaps a touch more purple, and its glittering rings were configured slightly differently, but if you squinted, you could almost imagine that you were back in the Sol system. Although Klondike VI was still some distance away, the haloed orb filled the main viewer. It shone with reflected light.

“Beautiful,” Uhura observed. “I’ve always liked ringed planets. There’s something special about them.”

“In what way, Lieutenant?” Spock asked. “Such rings are simply the result of predictable gravitational factors. Within a planet’s Roche limit, tidal forces tear
apart any large satellites and prevent new ones from being formed. Most rings are simply composed of random ice particles and other debris caught in a perpetual orbit.”

“I know all that, Mr. Spock,” Uhura replied. “But I still think they’re gorgeous.”

Spock did not argue the point. “I will concede that their symmetry has a certain aesthetic appeal.”

“These particular rings are more than decorative,” Kirk pointed out. He had been reading up on Klondike VI during the voyage. “Those aren’t just ice crystals circling that planet. The inner rings are laced with significant amounts of dilithium, enough to make a mining operation both profitable and crucial to the future of space exploration.”

The rings before them were like precious bracelets, sparkling with the rarest of gemstones. A shame they were destabilizing.

“Indeed,” Spock said. “Prior to the present crisis, the Skagway colony was on its way to becoming the primary source of crystallized dilithium in this sector. It would be a significant loss should the operations there be curtailed.”

“Not to mention the possible threat to the colony’s population,” Kirk reminded him. The captain squinted at the image of Klondike VI but could not make out the moon in question. “Are we within view of Skagway?”

According to their files, the moon occupied a gap between the inner and outer rings. Skagway’s own gravity
helped to keep the gap open—at least, until recently.

“Coming around now, Captain.” Sulu brought the
Enterprise
into orbit above the planet’s rings, then descended into the empty gap. Kirk spied a bright reflective object ahead of them. The moon grew larger as the starship quickly caught up with it. The
Enterprise
slowed to keep pace with the tiny moon. “There it is.”

Skagway was a small moon, barely one hundred kilometers in diameter. An icy white glaze, pock-marked with craters, covered its surface. No atmosphere protected it from random meteor strikes. Only a fraction of the size of Earth’s own moon, it was nonetheless home to nearly two thousand souls. Kirk hoped they weren’t in too much trouble.

“Full magnification,” he ordered.

A domed colony could be seen on the frozen surface of the moon. A crude spaceport surrounded the central dome. Automated harvesters and sifters, designed to extract dilithium from the nearby rings, were parked on landing pads composed of resurfaced ice. A small fleet of shuttles, tugs, and scout ships, ill equipped and insufficient to evacuate the entire colony, also occupied the spaceport. Crude hangars were presumably used to repair and service the various vehicles. Thermal collectors faced the planet, which, like Saturn, generated its own heat. Skagway rotated slowly on its axis, providing abbreviated days and nights for the people living beneath the translucent
geodesic dome. The moon’s dense core had made subterranean drilling both expensive and problematic.

Too bad,
Kirk thought. The colonists might be safer beneath the ground, at least in the short term.
If only we had some Hortas at our disposal.

Looking closer, the captain spied what appeared to be evidence of the emergency. Fresh craters pitted the frozen lunar landscape. Various shuttles and harvesters were visibly damaged, possibly beyond repair. And the colony’s protective dome, while still intact, had been pitted by multiple high-speed collisions with falling objects. Even as Kirk watched the viewer, chunks of icy debris pelted the airless moon, throwing up clouds of crystalline powder. A slab of ice (or was it dilithium?) the size of a small shuttle barely missed the dome, hitting a landing pad outside the colony. A limited array of surface-to-air phasers had been deployed to defend the dome but were clearly inadequate to the crisis at hand; they had been intended to deal with only the occasional random object, not a constant barrage. Skagway was caught in a cosmic hailstorm that seemed to be growing in ferocity.

“Receiving hailing frequencies,” Uhura reported. “It’s Governor Dawson.”

The
Enterprise
’s arrival had apparently not gone unnoticed.

“Put her through,” Kirk said.

“Yes, Captain.”

Skooka Dawson appeared on-screen. A handsome
woman in her late fifties who appeared to be of Aleutian descent, she was dressed simply in orange miner’s overalls. Close-cropped white hair framed a drawn face that showed obvious signs of strain. Dark pouches beneath her eyes hinted that she had not been sleeping well. A framed photo of the aurora borealis could be glimpsed in the background. A chunk of unprocessed dilithium rested atop her desk.

“Hello, Captain. Thank you for responding so promptly to our distress signal.”

“My pleasure, Governor.” Kirk was eager to get the straight scoop from the ground. “What’s your status?”

“Bad and getting worse,”
she replied, not mincing words. “
My scientists tell me that the planet’s rings are collapsing inward, which puts us right in the middle of an avalanche. We’ve had nonstop hailstorms for days now, and some of the bigger pieces are large enough to sink the
Titanic,
if you get the reference.”

“I know my maritime history,” he assured her. “How is your dome holding up?”

“We built this colony to last, but it was never meant to take this kind of punishment. The Yukon Gap is supposed to be clear of debris, or at least it always was before. Our deflectors are already being pushed to their limits, which is putting a severe strain on our resources. To be honest, I’m not sure how much longer we can hold out. We’ve already had to suspend all mining operations.”

The lights flickered in her office. A heavy thud rattled the paperweights on her desk.

“I understand,” Kirk said. “I’ll have my engineering team
see what they can do to reinforce your deflectors.” He looked ahead to the bigger picture. “Do your scientists have any idea what might be causing these disturbances?”

“Not yet, but I’ll see to it that all our data are transmitted to your ship.”
The lights sputtered again, then came back on.
“Perhaps you can spot something we missed.”

“Perhaps.” Kirk could only hope that Spock could unravel the mystery. “I don’t suppose there’s any sign that this is just a temporary phenomenon?”

“I keep hoping as much,”
she said,
“but if anything, the storms seem to be worsening. There’s also some concern that Skagway’s own orbit could be affected. We could end up falling into the inner rings—or worse.”

Kirk imagined the moon descending into the gas giant’s turbulent atmosphere. The planet’s intense gravity and violent storms would make short work of the domed colony, even if it succeeded in passing through the inner rings in one piece. No amount of deflectors could save them.

Not for the first time, the captain wished there was a nearby starbase or M-class planet that the colonists could be transported to. But the distances involved made multiple trips impractical; if the situation was as bad as it appeared, there was not nearly enough time to get the entire population to safety.

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” he said. “But we should be prepared to evacuate as many of your people as we can.”

Dawson nodded.
“No offense, Kirk, but I wish that
Constitution
-class ship of yours was bigger. I’m not looking forward to deciding who lives and who dies . . . like Kodos the Executioner.”

Kirk winced inside. Governor Dawson probably didn’t know it, but he had been on Tarsus IV when Kodos had condemned half the population to death during a planetwide famine. Kirk had only been thirteen years old at the time, but he still remembered the panic and heartbreak of those harrowing days, as Kodos had mercilessly culled the old, the infirm, and the “expendable.” The nightmare had not ended until Starfleet arrived to halt the purge.

At least justice caught up with him,
Kirk thought.
Eventually
.

“I met Kodos,” he said, “and I’m certain you’re nothing like him.”

Dawson didn’t ask for details. She clearly had other things on her mind.
“Let’s be clear about one thing, Captain. If it comes down to it, I am not leaving this colony before any of my people. I’m going down with the ship if necessary. End of story.”

Kirk understood. The Skagway colony wasn’t technically a ship, but the principle was the same. He could tell that her mind was made up. Photon torpedoes would not be enough to stop her from staying behind with the last of her people.

“That’s not going to happen,” he vowed. “We’re going to find a way to save the entire colony.”

2020

“Objection!” Zoe Querez gasped. “This is cruel and unusual punishment!”

Ignoring her protests, Colonel Christopher checked the timer instead. “Ten more minutes.”

The stowaway was fifty minutes into her mandatory one-hour workout on the treadmill. Given the pernicious effects of zero gravity on the human body, it would have been grossly inhumane
not
to let her get some exercise at least twice a day. A harness kept her strapped down to the treadmill and gave her resistance to strain against; otherwise, she could have run in place for hours and not gotten much benefit at all. Attached to force plates on either side of the treadmill, the harness simulated gravity by pulling down on her shoulders and hips with more than a hundred pounds of pressure. Globules of perspiration clung to her face and skin. Her shorts and tank top were soaked with sweat. Shaun knew from experience just how hard she was working. Those straps got very uncomfortable, very fast.

“Sadist! It would have been kinder to chuck me out the airlock.”

He chuckled. “Don’t let Fontana hear you say that.”

Thirty-plus days into the mission, Zoe had been a model prisoner so far. Talking Mission Control into continuing the mission, despite their unplanned passenger, had been a challenge, but Shaun and his fellow astronauts had ultimately prevailed. It had helped, of course, that the folks on the ground had been equally aware of the dire consequences of aborting the mission at the very moment public and political enthusiasm for the space program had reached record lows. Shaun knew that this decision was ultimately on him, though. He was still hoping that he hadn’t made a monumental mistake.

NASA had also chosen to keep the stowaway’s existence a secret for the time being, for fear of courting bad press. That was fine with Shaun. Let the PR flacks handle the spin control. He had a mission to complete.

A beep demanded his attention. He hit a button on his computer, and Fontana’s face appeared on the monitor. “You called?”

“Hate to interrupt your babysitting session,”
she said drily,
“but I thought you’d want to know that as of sixty seconds ago, we officially entered the asteroid belt.”
She smirked.
“No evasive action required yet.”

Shaun glanced out the nearest porthole. All he saw was the usual darkness and distant stars. No drifting boulders threatened the habitat module.

“We’ll have to break out a bottle of the good stuff
for dinner tonight,” he said. Officially, NASA frowned on alcohol in space, but their Russian partners were more inclined to look the other way where liquid refreshment was concerned. As it happened, some generous cosmonauts had smuggled a couple of bottles into one of the Soyuz capsules that had carried supplies up to the
Lewis & Clark
while it was in orbit. “I think this calls for a celebration, kind of like crossing the international date line back in the old days.”

“Just as long as I don’t have to be the designated driver,” Fontana quipped. “I’m not sipping Tang while you hit the booze. Red wine is supposed to be good for combating weightlessness, you know.”

“So I hear,” he said. Studies had shown that a component of red wine, resveratrol, could help prevent bone-density loss and muscle atrophy, two common effects of life in space. NASA had prescribed resveratrol supplements for the whole crew, although the tablets lacked certain other benefits associated with a nice bottle of wine. “I suspect the doc will abstain. He’s not much of a drinker.” Shaun had never known O’Herlihy to indulge. “In the meantime, keep your eyes peeled for rolling rocks.”