Chapter One
The cargo shuttle bucked and shuddered, caught in a savage wind gust that had erupted out of a still, clear dawn. Sulu threw a disbelieving look out his cockpit window at Tlaoli's garnet-dusted sky and saw nothing in its sunlit haze to indicate a storm brewing. He could even see plumes of mist, the exhaled breath of hidden caves, rising straight and calm from the splintered landscape of karst and sinkholes below him. But despite the testimony of his eyes, his hands and ears told him that a relentless avalanche of air had the shuttle clenched in its grip. Sulu could feel the little ship falling farther and farther away from the stable, banking turn he'd begun just a moment ago.
He'd been exultantly heading for home then, after locating a shadowy figure moving through the wilderness of fractured rock, a figure that could only be his own lost captain. That unexpected success, made on the one brief reconnaissance flight Sulu had been allowed before evacuating the rest of the stranded landing party from Tlaoli, had buoyed his spirits amazingly. After hours aboard the Enterprise fighting Tlaoli's unpredictable gravitational shifts and dangerous power drains, while Captain Kirk and his rescue party struggled to survive the killing cold and darkness of the caverns where the original landing party had been lost, it seemed as if the strange alien force that guarded this ancient planet had finally lost its grasp on them.
Then from nowhere, gale-force winds roared out of a clear morning sky and sent the shuttle Drake skidding out of control.
Sulu gave up trying to fight the wind's pull and instead swung the shuttle hard into it, hoping he could break through to calmer air on the other side. But before the roar of the engines had time to deepen in response, before the straining nacelles could even start to shriek in protest, the Drake snapped to a stop and hung frozen in midair. Sulu's breath caught in his throat. In all his years of flying, in craft as small as hang gliders and as large as the Enterprise, he had never before felt this kind of sudden arrest. This wasn't one of the alien planet's odd gravitational perturbations, or the unstoppable power drain that had made the Enterprise nearly crash into its surface only a few hours ago. This was simply -- stillness.
Sulu had no idea how long it lasted -- a few microseconds? half a minute? -- but there was absolutely no doubt about how it ended. The Drake was slammed out of its stillness by the unmistakable blow of an atmospheric shock wave. Sulu's inner ears told him the little ship was flipping sideways, but the sudden darkness outside his cockpit window blocked any view of what had exploded down on the planet, or which way he was being thrown by the blast. The deafening noise of detonation caught up with him an instant later, fast enough and loud enough to tell Sulu he'd been near the epicenter of whatever had just blown up.
The only thing that saved him from losing control entirely was the adrenaline spiking in his blood from the wind gusts he'd been fighting a moment before. Sulu found himself responding almost before he was consciously aware of the need to do so, flinging the shuttle across the vector of the blast instead of fighting it, then spiraling its uncontrolled tumble into a gravity-assisted dive that made the metal nacelles scream in protest as he exceeded their strain limit. That sound sharpened into a howl of torn metal as Sulu hauled the Drake up out of its dive, praying every second that the blinding smoke around him wouldn't suddenly turn into rocky ground. When he finally got control of the Drake again, it was riding the bow wave of the explosion like an awkward surfer. The shuttle's steep, nose-up position told Sulu more clearly than the red-flashing lights on his controls that he'd done some permanent damage to the nacelles. But for now, he was content to hold the Drake in whatever position gave it some aerodynamic equilibrium, letting the wave of battered air sweep him ever farther from the epicenter of the explosion.
The smoke began to clear away from his cockpit windows, revealing tantalizing shreds and scraps of ruddy light through its breaks. It didn't look much like the cold rose-quartz dawn Sulu had taken the shuttle up into. In fact, if he didn't know better, he would swear the light had the sullen humid glare of the tropics. Sulu glanced down at his instrument panel, whose gauges still flashed overloads and error readings from the strange subspace interference fields that had made them all useless on Tlaoli. With a sudden and completely unjustified intuition, he swept a hand across the bank of power switches, zeroing them all to black, then watching them as they booted back up again. Each and every gauge came back a steady, reliable green, even the one warning him about the high levels of tension where the shuttle's hull met its damaged nacelles. The subspace interference had vanished.
Wherever he was now, Sulu thought, it was nowhere near the strange alien caves of Tlaoli.
The smoke thinned a little, then, without warning, the shuttle surged away from the spreading wake of the explosion and into clear air as the propulsion of its own engines finally outpaced the weakening atmospheric shock wave it had been swept up in. Sulu saw a looming shadow of hills ahead of him and pulled the Drake up as gently as he dared, trying to spare its weakened nacelles now that he was free of the blast wave. He was so intent on crafting a low-stress, minimum-clearance arc over those hills that it took him a long moment to realize they were completely the wrong color.
The one thing the Enterprise had known about Tlaoli before it sent survey teams down to study it was that the little planet was ancient and dry and mostly barren of life. The only vegetation Sulu had seen, in his three trips down to the alien planet, consisted of drought-gnarled trees and thorny shrubs the same dry gray-brown as the rocks and dirt around them. But these hills looked as if they were made of sodden emerald velvet. Their canopied trees rose in such a lush tangle that Sulu couldn't see any trace of bare ground between them. In fact, the only things that didn't glow a vivid shade of green were the violet-gray strands of mist and ground-fog nestled in the hollows and winding valleys of the forested hills.
Sulu pursed his lips to whistle in amazement, but to his surprise, he found them too dry to allow any noise to come out. That observation led to another -- his hands were shaking despite their tight grip on the Drake's helm control, and his pulse was pounding so strongly that he could actually feel it throb beneath the skin of one temple. He would have put the fear down to the aftermath of being engulfed by a mysterious explosion if he hadn't caught his gaze straying again and again to a gauge that he normally paid no attention to. With a start, Sulu focused on it now -- and realized that the fundamental constant of planetary gravity to which all of his other shuttle instruments calibrated themselves had shifted up by three percent. The reading confirmed what some subconscious part of Sulu's brain must have already noticed and understood and been horrified by.
The planet he was on now was not Tlaoli.
Sulu gritted his teeth, fighting the urge to bank the Drake around at the speed he'd normally have used in an emergency, as if he could somehow find his way back to Tlaoli and the Enterprise just by reversing course. Some rational part of his brain knew that all the maneuver would accomplish would be to finish the job of tearing off the cargo shuttle's nacelles and strand him on this unknown world forever. But it still seemed worthwhile to find out what had exploded upon his arrival here -- a wormhole? an antimatter/
matter space warp? -- so he maneuvered the wounded shuttle into a slow, gentle arc and watched the crushed-velvet hills drift below him.
The verdant palette of chlorophyll-based colors should have warned Sulu that this unknown planet probably wasn't anywhere near as empty of animal life as Tlaoli had been. But it still came as a shock to him when the green mass of forest abruptly ended, towering a surprising height above the black rock walls that succeeded it. Sulu's startled gaze followed those walls up toward the horizon and saw them merge with others, rise in height, then become blunt terraces bristling with spikes -- no, not spikes, he realized as the Drake came closer, but hollow pipes, pipes that were moving sideways, pointing outward, turning to aim -- at him!
Sulu cursed and wrenched the Drake into an evasive maneuver, momentarily forgetting the shuttle's torn nacelles. Fortunately, his downward dive kept torque to a minimum, at least until he was forced to pull up out of it. In the meantime, he watched puffs of what looked like smoke emerge from the snouts of the moving weapons and wondered just how primitive this unknown culture was. Clearly, they recognized even a distant flying object as a threat and were prepared to shoot at it...but what exactly were they shooting? Nothing seemed to explode near him or on the ground below, even long after the smoke had emerged, so it wasn't some kind of explosive device or torpedo. Projectiles, perhaps, small enough to make no sign when they missed their mark and fell to the ground.
The weapons along the black stone terraces slowly tracked him as Sulu hurtled down toward them, coaxing the shuttle out of its dive by painful fractions of arc, wincing as he heard the occasional shriek of metal ripping just a little further. He could tell that the barrels of the weapons weren't able to keep pace with his headlong dive, although to his surprise they all seemed to be trying. That was a gift he hadn't expected, that the crews who were manning those installations wouldn't realize that what came down must -- if it were to survive -- head back up again. If even one weapon stopped trying to track along his path and instead paused, wa...
