Star Trek_ A Choice of Catastrophes - Michael Schuster [11]
The sudden weight of the satellite caught him by surprise, and he almost lost his grip, but Kologwe was waiting to brace it from inside the shuttle. Emalra’ehn was fine, of course.
The three of them moved the satellite to the back of the shuttle as Doctor M’Benga resealed the door. The two scientists—Jaeger from geophysics and Saloniemi from archaeology and anthropology—looked up from their tricorders, but not for long. They had data from the sensor sweep to occupy their attention.
Scotty pulled off his helmet and slung it onto the deck of the shuttle. “Well, that was exciting.”
Emalra’ehn shrugged. “I’ve had better.”
As Scotty took off his suit, he gave silent thanks that he’d put yet another EVA behind him. Above all, the thing Scotty didn’t like about spacewalking was that it made him realize how small he was compared to the rest of the universe. It made him feel unimportant and useless. Unsettling, that.
Well, there was one good way to combat that feeling. Scott smiled at the thought of studying this piece of alien tech. The sooner he could figure out what this satellite was for, the better.
Lieutenant Commander Salvatore Giotto had to admit he’d been on more challenging missions. He wasn’t bored—and even if he had been, he would have had no right to complain, considering that he’d volunteered—but from a purely professional point of view, Mu Arigulon V was rapidly shaping up to be what security officers called a “haunted planet.”
Haunted planets had one big danger: the lack of excitement led you to become complacent and inattentive. As a junior officer on the Lantree, he had participated in a similar survey, only to be caught unawares by local predators that had gravely injured Captain Gees. With twenty additional years of experience, Giotto felt he was the perfect man to look after James Kirk. The captain could be a challenge. At least on this dirtball there was little chance of him getting into a fight with local aliens—if the scientists’ readings could be believed.
It paid to be wary of first results, another lesson bitterly learned. More than once, Giotto had witnessed how quickly a boring mission could turn into a deadly trap with little hope of escape. For a long time he’d kept the scars on his back to remind him of this, but he’d eventually realized how foolish it was and gotten rid of them.
The Columbus team was exploring the northeastern edge of a once-thriving metropolis. They’d split up—Giotto was with the captain and Ensign Seven Deers. He liked the engineer; nearly as old as Giotto, Seven Deers had raised two kids, making her more practical as well as more taciturn than other crew members.
He squinted in the bright light of the midday sun. The captain was picking out a path through the city, trying to take in as much of it as he could, occasionally asking Seven Deers what she thought the purpose of different structures might be. Giotto would have preferred point, but Captain Kirk would never allow it, so he followed behind, keeping his eyes open to assess where danger might arise.
Toothpick-like towers, barely wider than the Columbus was long, pierced the sky, their tops disappearing in the clouds. Ahead, the thin towers gave way to a squat building, round in general shape, but with many bulges on its outside, like a fat, warty toad. The road system was obviously designed around this mound.
“Ensign,” Captain Kirk began, “do you have any idea what those bulges are?”
Seven Deers looked up from her tricorder. “Dense machinery of some kind, Captain, but I can’t make out what. I’d like to get closer.”
“To do that,” Kirk said with a grin, “we’re going to have to figure out how to open the doors.”
Several large semicircles a little taller than Giotto were set into the ground floor