Star Trek: That Which Divides Read online

  Located in an area of non-aligned space near Federation and Romulan territory, the Kondaii system is home to a unique stellar phenomenon: a spatial rift that opens every three years in proximity to the system’s sole inhabited planet. Only during this brief period is communication possible with the small, mineral-rich planetoid inside the rift. The local population has established a mining colony on this planetoid, and for the limited du ration that the rift is open, a massive interplanetary operation is set into motion: ferrying mineral ore to the home planet while simultaneously transferring personnel and replenishing essential supplies and equipment—everything necessary to sustain the colony before it once again enters forced isolation.

  While studying the rift, the science vessel U.S.S. Huang Zhong is severely damaged and crash-lands on the planetoid. After the Star-ship Enterprise arrives to conduct rescue operations, evidence quickly points to the rift’s artificial nature. It is a feat far beyond the capacity of the local inhabitants, and presents an alluring mystery for Captain James T. Kirk and his crew. It also attracts the attention of the Romulans, who are most interested in studying and perhaps seizing this supposed advanced technology—by any means necessary.

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  “T’Vrel, what is it?”

  “The helm is slow to respond,” the Vulcan replied. “I am having difficulty arresting our speed.”

  On the screen, Gralafi’s surface was now highlighted by a reddish-purple sky occupying the image’s upper third. The ground continued to rush past, and terrain features now were clearly visible, growing larger and more ominous with each passing second. A single thought echoed in Ronald Arens’s mind.

  We’re not going to make it.

  “Helm control is failing,” T’Vrel reported, and this time even her stoic demeanor seemed to be cracking around the edges. “Captain, I cannot prevent a crash landing.”

  Without hesitation, Arens once more hit the intercom switch with his fist. “All hands, this is the captain! Crash protocols! Brace for impact!” Then, looking to Hebert, he said, “Launch the buoy.”

  As the first officer moved to comply with the order, Arens could do nothing except watch as the last sliver of sky disappeared from the top of the viewscreen, leaving only the barren, uninviting surface of the planetoid to draw ever closer.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  ISBN 978-1-4516-5068-6

  ISBN 978-1-4516-5069-3 (ebook)

  For Michi, Addison, and Erin, who give me the time and space needed to do this, and who make sure I’m well-fed and loved along the way.

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  Contents

  Historian’s Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Acknowledgments

  About The Author

  HISTORIAN’S NOTE

  The events in this story take place in late 2269 (ACE), during the fourth year of James Kirk’s five-year mission as captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701.

  ONE

  As a former science officer and now the captain of a science vessel, Ronald Arens had encountered his share of interesting stellar phenomena. There had been the odd black hole or quasar, stars in the midst of going nova, and the occasional nebula here and there. He even had spent two weeks studying a rogue pulsar. Nothing Arens had seen with his own eyes or read about in reports submitted by those observing even stranger examples of spatial oddities compared to the image now displayed on the main viewscreen of the U.S.S. Huang Zhong’s bridge.

  “Okay,” Arens said, rising from his command chair and moving closer to the screen, “I think this qualifies as an impressive welcome to the Kondaii system, especially considering how we nearly blew out our engines trying to get here.” Built for speed, the Huang Zhong, an Archer-class scout ship configured to hold an enhanced suite of sensor arrays and other science-related information-gathering equipment, had proceeded here at maximum speed after its abrupt reassignment from patrol duty. Despite his comment, the dependable little craft had handled with ease the exertion of traveling at high warp for nearly a week. As for why they had been dispatched, the captain had been told that the ship originally assigned to be here, the U.S.S. Lexington, had been deployed elsewhere on a task of greater priority. Though his ship’s science equipment would do in a pinch, Arens knew it could not substitute for a Constitution-class vessel. To that end, the Enterprise was being redirected to the Kondaii system to take on the brunt of the survey and research tasks. Until then, it was the Huang Zhong’s show.

  Fine by me, Arens mused as he contemplated the anomaly on the viewscreen. To him, it appeared to be something of a cross between a plasma storm and a matter-antimatter explosion. It was an amorphous mass of energy, shifting and undulating in space, all while staying confined within what Arens already had been told was more or less a spherical area less than five hundred kilometers in diameter. Within that region was chaos, in the form of a kaleidoscopic maelst
rom of light and color that seemed to fold back on itself, only to surge forth anew moments later. At the center of the field was a dark area, roughly circular in shape, which seemed to beckon to him. It took Arens an extra minute to realize that he had become all but mesmerized by the imagery.

  “Captain?” a voice said from behind him, and Arens blinked as he turned to see Lieutenant Samuel Boma, a slightly-built man of African descent wearing a blue uniform tunic and regarding him with an expression that indicated the younger man had been waiting for his commanding officer with both patience and amusement.

  Clearing his throat, Arens smiled. “I was daydreaming again, wasn’t I?”

  The Huang Zhong’s science officer’s features remained fixed as he shook his head in melodramatic fashion. “I’m not qualified to speculate on that topic, sir. At all.”

  “Damned right, you’re not.” Arens’s smile grew wider. Their easy banter, something the captain had missed, was a product of his and Boma’s service together years earlier. Arens at the time was the science officer on the Constellation, while Boma had been a fresh-faced junior-grade lieutenant fresh out of Starfleet Academy’s advanced astrophysics school. The friendship begun during that joint tour of duty continued even after both men went their separate ways to different assignments. Boma had joined the Huang Zhong’s crew less than six months earlier, transferring from a ground posting at Starbase 12 following a less than stellar performance while serving aboard the Enterprise. After Boma had run into trouble stemming from insubordination charges that resulted in a permanent notation in his service record, he had requested a transfer to any ship or station. When Arens found out that his friend was available, he had petitioned Starfleet Command to have Boma join his crew. Starfleet granted the request, allowing Arens to make sure that Boma was afforded a chance to redeem himself.

  Gesturing toward the viewscreen, Arens said, “All right, let’s get down to business. What can you tell me about this thing?”

  Boma replied, “Not much; at least, not yet. As the initial reports indicated, it’s about eight hundred thousand kilometers from the system’s fourth planet. According to my calculations, it maintains a consistent elliptical orbit with a duration of seventeen point six days.” He paused, pointing to the screen and indicating the dark area at the center of the energy field. “Most of the time, it’s impassable, but the rift we’re seeing appears at intervals that compute out to be approximately two point seven Earth years, give or take as much as two months. The rift stays open for a period of about thirty-eight days, again plus or minus a day or three, though it doesn’t just close; it shrinks over a period of several days before fading altogether. From the reports we’ve received, once the rift’s closed, that’s it until the next time it opens. No way in or out.” He gestured toward the screen. “The locals have a name for it that translates more or less as ‘the Pass.’ Seems appropriate enough for me.”

  “Damnedest thing I’ve ever heard of,” Arens said, reaching up to rub the back of his bald head. Since being given the assignment to observe this phenomenon, he had familiarized himself with whatever information he could find on the Kondaii system, or System 965, as it had been catalogued after initial surveys by unmanned Starfleet reconnaissance probes more than a decade earlier. From the reports he had read, such as those provided by Federation first-contact teams that had visited the Kondaii system more than a year earlier as well as the most recent accounts submitted by continuing contact specialists and diplomatic envoys, the people who called the fourth planet, Dolysia, their home had always been aware of the phenomenon. Like their sun or the pair of moons orbiting their planet or even the other seven worlds occupying the Kondaii system, the mysterious anomaly had always been a part of the Dolysian people’s history.

  “What about its interior?” Arens asked. “Anything on the moon or planetoid or whatever it is hiding in there?”

  The science officer shook his head. “Not much, really. The locals call it ‘Gralafi,’ which in their language translates to something like ‘playful child,’ no doubt owing to the way it plays hide-and-seek from within the anomaly. It has a Class-M environment like the Dolysians’ own planet, so I suppose that’s a huge plus.” He shrugged. “By all accounts, it may be a dwarf planet, but there’s no way to know if it originally was part of this system and became trapped within that region, or if it’s from somewhere else. We won’t know anything until we get a closer look at it, run some scans, and see if it shares any properties with the planets here.”

  “Regardless of where it came from,” Arens said, “or where it might belong, the Dolysians have certainly made the best of it.” The revelation that a spatial body had been discovered inside the rift residing within a form of pocket or other compartmentalized region of space had come as a surprise to him. Even more astonishing was learning that the Dolysians had explored and even settled upon it, having found a means of working with the rift’s sporadic if mostly predictable accessibility. A largely self-sufficient mining colony, constructed on the planetoid decades earlier, now played a vital role in meeting the energy production needs of several of Dolysia’s nation-states. “This mineral they extract, erinadium? It’s present on the home planet’s two moons, right?”

  Boma replied, “Yes, sir, and it’s also on the planet itself, though in all three cases it’s not found in nearly the same abundance. The Dolysians had made the transition to using the material to meet their energy needs decades before the first probes into the anomaly found the planetoid and discovered its rich erinadium deposits. Once they knew that, there was a focused effort to get a permanent facility up and running. According to their projections, there’s enough erinadium on the planetoid to keep the lights on for a couple of centuries.”

  “Wow,” Arens said, impressed at the effort the Dolysians had expended and the rewards they seemed to be enjoying for their work. “Well, that’d certainly justify the risk you’d think would be inherent in a project of this magnitude. On a different note, it suggests the planetoid might be native to this system, after all. It’ll be interesting to see if we can offer them some new insight.”

  Boma replied, “That’s going to be easier said than done, though, as our sensor scans are being scattered as they come into contact with the rift’s . . . the anomaly’s outer boundary.”

  Noting the other man’s change of word choice, Arens cocked his head as he regarded his friend. “You don’t think it’s an interspatial rift?” The idea that this might be a doorway of sorts—to another part of the universe or to another universe or reality entirely—made the captain’s mind race to consider the possibilities. “It wouldn’t be the first time something like that’s been encountered, after all.” Shrugging, he added, “Though it’d be a first for me.”

  “Rifts such as those,” Boma replied, “at least the ones we know about, have usually been found to have some common characteristics. Energy distortion fields, chroniton or verteron particle emissions, time dilation effects, and so on. I’m not picking up anything like that from this thing.”

  Arens frowned, crossing his arms before reaching up to stroke his thin, close-cropped beard. “Absence of such characteristics doesn’t automatically rule out this being some kind of interspatial rift or conduit.”

  “Which is why I’m going to stick with my story of not having the first clue what it is, sir,” Boma said. “If it is a conduit, then what’s on the other side? Where’s the other end, where does it go, and what—or who—might be there?”

  “Those are all interesting questions which we have also asked, Captain, though we have been unable to answer them.”

  Arens and Boma turned in response to the new voice to see the Huang Zhong’s first officer, Commander April Hebert, standing near the bridge’s doorway. With her was the guest to whom the ship was playing host, a Dolysian female who earlier had introduced herself as Rzaelir Zihl du Molidin. Though she was humanoid in appearance, at least in a general sense, there still were several exterior differences in her physi
ology when compared to humans. Her skin was a pale yellow with a hint of green; a Vulcan-like pigmentation, Arens thought. The pupils of her eyes were almost devoid of color, with only the slightest shade of red encircling tiny irises. Rather than cartilage forming a nose, there was only a slight indentation beneath her eyes with a trio of small holes which Arens took to be nostrils. The upper portion of her rounded skull flared outward at a point just above small openings on each side, which seemed to serve as her ears. What little hair she possessed was confined to a single narrow strip that began just above the groove between her eyes and continued up and over her head to the nape of her long, thin neck. From there, the hair hung down below her shoulders, braided and intertwined with a strand of black material. The result resembled a ponytail, which hung down across the front of the Dolysian’s right shoulder so that Arens could see a decorative silver band encircling its end. Her clothing consisted of a single-piece, floor-length gown tailored to her trim, almost petite physique. The garment had been fashioned from a shiny material that reminded Arens of silk, colored a light tan with threads of white and silver woven into the fabric.

  Smiling, Arens said, “Advisor Zihl, welcome to the bridge.” When he had all but choked during his first attempt at mimicking her pronunciation, the Dolysian had taken apparent pity on him by explaining that in her society—one of however many that called her planet home—names acted as a means of honoring respected family members. When a member died, others in the family might be inspired to add a portion of that person’s name to their own, a process that continued throughout the lives of those offering such tributes. In the case of Rzaelir Zihl du Molidin, Zihl was her given name, and her title of “advisor” was given to her while operating in her role as one of numerous liaisons between the Federation and the various Dolysian governments.

  “Thank you, Captain,” she replied, bowing her head for a brief moment. “It is an honor to be here.”