“Uh, Captain,” Xiong said as he tugged a parka from the locker, “Ensign Spencer is working in the artifact control room and I need to join him there.”
Zhao’s face sobered a bit, his own eagerness to learn more about the unknown visibly dashed. Then he stood a bit straighter, almost as if accepting the unpalatable situation that he simply would be nonessential personnel in the control room. “Understood, Lieutenant,” Zhao said. “I won’t keep you from your duties.”
Xiong slid into the parka and headed past Zhao, but then he stopped. He could not push himself through the doorway, not if doing so meant leaving another explorer behind. He paused, recognizing in that moment that he and Zhao were very similar in certain respects. They likely had joined Starfleet with the very same hopes and dreams of seeing just what awaited them in the farthest reaches of uncharted space.
Despite a nagging, cautioning voice in the back of his mind, Xiong turned back into the room.
“You’re welcome to join me, Captain,” he said, and offered a small smile, “but only if you brought your winter coat.”
Zhao’s expression brightened in amusement, displaying more emotion than Xiong could recall seeing before now. “I’m always prepared, Lieutenant,” he said, “but I’ll have to bring a few friends along as well. Regulations, you know.”
Xiong shrugged. I’ll guess I’ll just have to swear them all to secrecy when we get there.
10
“A little groggy there, son? You look all slumped over!”
Ensign Stephen Klisiewicz raised his head from his console at the sciences station and looked across the Endeavour’s bridge to the source of the voice. Pointing to where his attention had been focused, he said, “This device is a viewer, sir. It requires the user to hunch down and look into it. I understand how that might be a new concept to an engineer such as yourself, Commander. You’re more used to crawlinginto things rather than just looking into them.”
Bersh glov Mog released a laugh that sounded more like a belch—one that rose over the rest of the bridge’s ambient noise—and that was enough to set Klisiewicz to laughing a bit on his own.
“Well, we all learn by doing,” Mog replied, offering the Tellarite equivalent of a smile, which to Klisiewicsz still looked like the fierce rictus of a rabid dog.
The engineer’s sentiment underscored the sense that, in its own slow way, the Endeavourwas becoming something of a teaching vessel. Mog seemed to run engineering more as a training lab, mixing up duty rosters and making sure his staff became highly proficient at all aspects of operations rather than focusing on a single area of specialization. Khatami seemed to follow his lead by rotating untried personnel into roles of greater responsibility when opportunities arose. Even Captain Zhao seemed to make himself available to officers fresh out of the Academy, such as Klisiewicz, to discuss matters of life and duty aboard a starship.
Okay, so maybe not so much in sickbay,he thought, but every place else is pretty open to a new guy like me.
Two hours into his duty shift, and the chief engineer had started tossing wisecracks across the bridge at his expense. Had the remark come from someone other than Mog, he surely would have held his tongue in reply. While Klisiewicz was becoming fast friends with the Tellarite chief engineer, he noticed in his first scan around the bridge that other than Mog’s, there were few familiar faces.
He knew Commander Khatami, of course, who in Captain Zhao’s absence now occupied the Endeavour’s center seat, but his conversations with her typically did not stray from whatever task was at hand. Specifically, she was the one to pass to him any information he might need in the course of his duties regarding his continual search for class-V forms of life, otherwise known as anything containing the Taurus meta-genome. Those conversations rarely were chatty; it seemed to be a sobering subject for her, he sensed.
The communications officer looked familiar, but his name escaped Klisiewicz at the moment, and the navigator, Lieutenant McCormack, well, he did recognize her, as she was one of his favorite objects of secret unrequited affection on the entire ship.
Turning back to the science console, the ensign noted the white blinking indicator and toggled the controls to transfer the sensor data to an eye-level display. Looking over the readings, he knit his brow before turning to Khatami, who already was regarding him expectantly.
“Commander,” he said, “we’re registering a new power reading from the surface.”
“Location?” Khatami asked, spinning her chair to face him.
Klisiewicz keyed in a few commands, allowing the computer to correlate the sensor data. “It’s about five kilometers northwest of the encampment and…about two kilometers beneath the planet’s surface.”
“Anything else?” Khatami asked.
“The energy signature is weak, but pretty distinctive, Commander,” Klisiewicz replied as he entered new commands to the console, self-conscious of getting her more information as quickly as he was able. “It’s definitely a geothermal source, and it’s slowly building in temperature.”
“Keep an eye on it, Ensign,” Khatami said, her eyes turning to the main viewer, “Provide regular updates as appropriate, and relay those sensor readings to the survey teams on the surface.”
“Aye, Commander,” Klisiewicz said as he keyed the required commands to route the data. The swiftness of a starship’s response to human command was something for which he was sure he would never lose a sense of marvel.
Then another alert indicator flashed on his console.
“Commander!” he called out to Khatami even as he bent over the hooded viewer once more. Reviewing the new stream of sensor telemetry being fed to his station, he said, “We’re picking up a second power reading now.”
“And?” Khatami asked.
“It’s confirmed, sir. Same energy signature as before,” he said, checking his calculations. “Bearing due south of the encampment this time, less than five kilometers out.”
“Any ideas, Mr. Mog?” the first officer asked after a moment. “Could they be activating the artifact?”
“Well, we could ask,” the engineer replied before turning back to his station.
“Mr. Estrada, hail Lieutenant Xiong at the encampment,” Khatami said, “and let’s see what’s going on down there.”
Activate the artifact? Can theydo that?
Klisiewicz involuntarily rubbed his arm as he felt goose bumps rise beneath his sleeves. His thoughts turned to Ravanar IV and the destruction dealt to the research facility there by the Tholians, who apparently had taken issue with a Federation presence on that world. According to what he had learned from rumors and other scuttlebutt around the ship, Lieutenant Xiong, who had been there along with a landing party from the U.S.S. Enterpriseinvestigating the aftermath of an earlier Tholian attack, had barely escaped with his life.
And Ravanar didn’t even have an intactstructure, he thought, but the Tholians still wanted us to leave it the hell alone. Could the same thing happen here—or something worse?As he turned his attention back to the incoming stream of data from the planet’s two newly energized power sources, Klisiewicz could not help thinking that someone, somewhere, would learn what was happening on Erilon—and not like it one bit.
Xiong jumped from the driver’s seat of the encampment’s all-terrain vehicle, his face chilled by icy wind as he made his way quickly to a black, manually operated hatch—the only distinct feature on the snow-encrusted front of a temporary structure at the base of the artifact. He turned and squinted through the bright white of swirling snow to see his five passengers step out of the side hatch of the vehicle, which had been adapted for use on Erilon with rear treads and an assembly of shock-absorbing skis mounted in place of its front axle.