Greg Cox - Star Trek - The Original Series - The Rings of Time

Kirk could see that. The surface of Klondike VI was vast and turbulent, after all. He could hardly expect the colonists to monitor every square kilometer of the planet at all times. Skagway was primarily a mining operation, not a scientific outpost. The gas giant was just background scenery to them.

“And the hexagon started shrinking around the same time the rings began collapsing?” the captain noted. “That can’t be a coincidence.”

“No,” she agreed. “But is it a cause or an effect? Or is some other factor causing both phenomena?”

Kirk looked at Spock. “What do you think? Could what’s happening to the hexagon be causing the rings to deteriorate?”

“That is impossible to determine without further data,” Spock declared, clearly reluctant to speculate before all of the facts were in. “But this development certainly warrants closer study. I suggest we use the ship’s scanners to examine the vortex.”

“An excellent idea, Mr. Spock,” Kirk said, “pro-vided it doesn’t get in the way of protecting the colony.” He mentally charted the Enterprise ’s position, trying to determine a location that would put them in the best place to observe the planet’s north pole and defend the besieged moon at the same time. That was going to be tricky. “Don’t forget. Hundreds of lives are at stake.”

“I am quite aware of that, Captain,” Spock stated, “but unless we can determine the source of the disturbances and find a means to reverse them, there will be no colony to defend.”

Qat Zaldana inhaled sharply behind her veil.

“Forgive my bluntness,” Spock apologized. “But the facts are what they are.”

“You needn’t apologize for stating the truth, Mr. Spock.” Her voice was solemn but unshaken. “Skagway is doomed unless we can stop this. I know that.”

Kirk was impressed by her bravery. He’d known Starfleet recruits to crack under less pressure. “Aside from the hexagon, is there anything else we should know? Another avenue of investigation?”

“Funny you should ask that, Captain.” She placed a new card in the computer. “There is something else you should see.”

The seething hexagon vanished from the screens, replaced by the image of a luminous white comet. A haze of dusty vapor surrounded its frozen nucleus. Its misty tail stretched out behind it, no doubt pointed away from the nearest sun.

“Our long-range scanners just detected this comet entering our solar system. And it appears to be coming straight toward us.”

2020

“Okay,” Zoe said. “Now I understand why you all wanted to get here.”

After more than ninety days in transit, Saturn loomed before them in all its majesty. Although still more than four million kilometers away, the ringed planet dominated the view from the cockpit windows. All three astronauts, plus one stowaway, had gathered on the flight deck to take in the breathtaking sight. The mustard-colored planet was immeasurably vast, second only to Jupiter in size. Horizontal bands of yellow and gold marked the passage of cyclonic winds zipping past one another in opposite directions. Saturn’s winds were believed to be the most ferocious in the solar system, reaching speeds of more than eighteen thousand kilometers per hour, while its fabled rings, which could be subdivided into thousands of smaller ringlets, spread out in concentric circles from the planet’s equator, not unlike the tattoo at the back of Zoe’s neck. Shaun wondered if she’d had it done for the voyage.

“Almost there,” Shaun said, proud of their accomplishment. They had passed through the asteroid belt unscathed, bypassed Jupiter and its deadly radiation field, and made it across the solar system to Saturn. They were farther from home than any explorer had ever ventured before — any human explorer, that was. “Well done, folks.”

“Yes,” O’Herlihy said hoarsely, choking up. “So much hard work, all our sacrifices… yet here we are. We made it.”

Shaun patted him on his back. The doc was entitled to get emotional at a moment like this. “It’s a great feeling, isn’t it?”

“You bet.” Fontana high-fived Shaun, wedging her foot into a rail to keep the motion from sending her flying across the deck. Her face was alight with jubilation; she didn’t even seem to mind that Zoe was sharing this moment with them. “Just look at those rings. Earth’s got nothing like that.”

Zoe tapped away at her smart tablet, recording the moment for posterity. Shaun had returned the device to her after making sure its wireless capacity had been disabled and that it held no terrorist-friendly apps. He suspected that the authorities would confiscate the tablet once she returned to Earth, but in the meantime, it gave her something to do, especially since she wasn’t allowed to touch any of the ship’s computer terminals, not even for recreational purposes. Cabin fever could be dangerous in space, so it had seemed best to keep her occupied.

She looked up from the tablet and squinted at the windows. “So, that’s the famous hexagon,” she said. “Freaky.”

As it happened, the planet was tilted toward them at about a twenty-six-degree angle, giving them a clear view of its north pole, where a distinctive honeycomb shape contained a colossal storm some forty thousand kilometers across. The hexagon had first been observed by Voyager 1 more than forty years ago, Shaun recalled. Scientists had been arguing about it ever since.

“One of the solar system’s odder natural wonders,” O’Herlihy observed, somewhat less emotionally than before. His deep voice had regained its cool, professorial tone. “Quite remarkable.”

“I don’t know,” Zoe said. “That doesn’t look natural at all to me. More like evidence of some arcane alien intelligence.”

O’Herlihy sighed; he had little patience for speculative pseudo-science. “Really, Zoe, you’re worse than my students. You need to rely less on the Internet and crackpot theories and more on actual scientific research.” He nodded at the view. “Although deceptively artificial in appearance, that vortex is nothing but an unusual storm formation created by rotational forces deep within the planet’s turbulent atmosphere.”

Zoe wasn’t convinced. “But look at it. A perfect geometric figure with six sides of exactly equal length, unchanged for decades? You’re telling me that just happened by accident?”

“The universe is a big place,” Shaun reminded her. “There’s time and space enough for all sorts of unlikely occurrences. Anything that can happen probably has.”

“Like mysterious alien science projects?” Zoe said. “Who knows? Maybe there’s some weird black monolith at the center of the hexagon.”

“Not on this space odyssey,” Shaun said. “I don’t know about you, but I’m not planning to evolve into a higher form of life anytime soon.”

Zoe winked at him. “Speak for yourself.”

“Jesus,” Fontana said, exasperated. “You really don’t know when to give up, do you?”

“Would I be here if I did?”

“My point exactly.”

Shaun intervened before Saturn witnessed its first zero-gravity catfight. “In any event, I hope we’ll learn a lot more about that storm, and the rest of Saturn’s weather patterns, while we’re in the neighborhood.”

The plan was to settle into a polar orbit threading the planet’s rings and study Saturn and its moons for fourteen days before turning around and heading home. NASA expected them to accumulate enough data to keep scientists back on Earth occupied for years. With any luck, some of the data might actually explain the enigmatic hexagon once and for all.

“Indeed,” O’Herlihy said. “I’m looking forward to checking out the magnetometer readings on that storm, not to mention getting a close-up look at that comet.”