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The navigation console sparked and then belched out an enormous gout of smoke. Sulu hadn’t noticed Ensign Harper grab Farrell, but the navigator wasn’t there anymore, thank goodness. The force of the explosion knocked the unconscious Rahda out of her chair, and Sulu had to hold on tight to maintain his footing.

The Enterprise was pulling out of the distortion, but it was careening out of control now. He had to stabilize it, had to stop it from spinning off into space and even more trouble.

His hands sped over the controls as fast as they could. He didn’t have much time. The explosions had worked their way across the bridge from starboard to port.

There was a sudden flash of light and a loud noise. And then Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu didn’t see or hear anything at all.

Despite the stunning sight before him, Jim Kirk was frustrated. Their discovery of a sentient species cryogenically hidden from prying eyes would redefine the Enterprise’s mission of exploration in this sector, but that didn’t help them find their missing crewman.

Tricorders picked up thousands of Farrezzi life signs—Chekov estimated there were thirty-four thousand cryopods in this chamber alone. Who knew how many more of these chambers were hidden away beneath the planet’s surface, but there were no human life signs. None at all. Part of Kirk wanted to wake one of the aliens up and yell at it, demanding the location of his missing man. But, rationally, he knew that would be absurd.

“Captain.” Chekov’s voice rang out from around the other side of a row of pods. The landing party had fanned out, but Kirk had ordered everyone to stay in visual range of one another.

“Over here, Mister Chekov,” he answered. “Not too loud, remember.” Giotto had advised caution until he and Tra could ascertain that they were truly alone.

The ensign squeezed between two pods to join his captain. Barely able to contain his excitement, Chekov pointed at the pod in front of him. “Captain, this is remarkable. These beings are perfect pentamerian organisms!”

“Excellent, Mister Chekov.” Kirk waited a beat. “Now assume I don’t share your expert knowledge of biology.”

He had kept his voice light, but it still looked like the ensign was actually turning red. “Sorry, sir. They are radially symmetrical, in five roughly equal parts, like many species of Earth starfish, for example. That’s why we can’t pick a front or a back side, sir. There’s little about sentient pentamerians in our scientific literature, but what’s there leads me to think the Farrezzi can move in any direction without changing their orientation.”

“Remarkable.” Completely nonhumanoid sentients were rare. Kirk peered at the alien closely. “I don’t see a mouth.”

“That’s because we would expect it at the front, which doesn’t make sense from an anatomical standpoint.”

Chekov was clearly enjoying himself. Maybe the ensign would stop beating himself up over what had happened to Yüksel.

Chekov explained, “If you have five limbs and can move in any direction, the only parts of you that stay more or less the same regardless of where you’re facing are the upper and lower ends of your torso. If you look closely, you can see a… an aperture, there on top. Given that it is ringed by five eyestalks, I am tempted to say this is the Farrezzi’s mouth.”

The captain had a closer look, and he could see what Chekov was pointing at. The protruding eyes were closed, but it was clear what they were. Looking almost like the eyestalks of a crab, only many times bigger and equipped with eyelids, they were placed equidistant around the central torso. There was no clearly definable head, at least none that the captain could make out, since the torso, almost as long as Kirk, started out wider at the top and grew thinner at the bottom. The five limbs were attached below the torso’s halfway point. He imagined they could serve as both arms and legs.

“Good work, Ensign. Continue your scans. I’m going to talk to Ensign Seven Deers.”

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