Work Text:
The air was thick with dust and ash by the time we finished scrambling up the tumbled tower of rubble. After three months on this planet—and almost three years on similar ones—it was a familiar sensation, but I still couldn’t help but choke, hacking a cough into my sleeve.
“Well then ensign” I rasp once I manage to recover. “Do you think this was a military base then?” Silence. I turn. Ensign Kuruvila’s eyes were wide and glazed-over. They stood still, staring out over the vista that spread out below us. Well, it was hard to blame them. Broken pillars of broken concrete and melted glass surrounded us, etching jagged lines against the sky, looming over dunes of ash and rubble that had been churned to mud by snow-melt. Above us was only a dark, sullen grey, storm clouds threatening another blizzard. Specks of gold and blue and red were the only sign of color in the entire panorama, as Starfleet teams spread out to survey the ruins. The warbles and beeps of tricorders and survey equipment could be heard clearly over the low whistle of the wind. It was silent, just like the rest of the world. “Ensign Kuruvila?” I say softly. “Are you ok?” They jump, shakes their head, then blush furiously.
“I’m fine! Very sorry ma’am. It’s just……”
“I understand” I say, giving their shoulder a quick squeeze. It couldn’t be easy going straight from the Academy to a Ghost Patrol ship. “Did you hear my question?”
“Yes ma’am! And…...no. I don’t think so. The blast patterns are all wrong.”
“Oh?”
“Look at the striations on that building” they say, pointing at a slumped-over sheet of concrete that had once been a roof or wall. They sound much more confident now there’s a simple technical problem to focus on, and I smile inwardly. “If this site had been directly targeted, we’d be seeing omnidirectional markings from the shock wave. But they’re unidirectional, see?” Tongue poking out the corner of their mouth, they pull out her tricorder and take another reading. “I think this must have been a suburb or some kind of industrial park. The blast came from about ten kilometers that way. I bet that’s where we’ll find the base.” They shudder. “That had to be…..pretty intense.”
“They were using 60-70 megaton fusion weapons, loaded onto intercontinental ballistic missiles” I say quietly. “That’s about as intense as you can get without discovering antimatter.” Even after months of digging we only understood the dimmest outlines of the causes of the war that had destroyed TU4587-III’s civilization—there had been a large power dominating the equatorial continent, it seemed, facing a coalition of smaller states controlling the outer archipelagoes and antarctic continent, and possibly a third player holding the plateaus to the east. But we could trace the course of their self-immolation with almost forensic precision. Of course, we’d had practice. Nuclear war was of the most common things for the Ghost Patrol to find. “So, if the impact site wasn’t here, then why the background radiation levels so high here?” I ask. Kuruvila frowns.
“Interference from an ionic power source?” they suggest. “That might cause a spike in Tupolov radiation, even after all this time.” I smile.
“I think you’re right. Let’s see if we can’t nail down a direction—" Footsteps crunch on the loose scree behind us, and I turn to see a crewman dashing up the rocky slope. He comes to a halt, panting, and salutes.
“Captain! Message for you just came in from Starbase 73!” He holds out a message PADD. I return the salute, take it, and begin to read.
My first officer, Commander Talpon, is already back at the command post when I return, which makes things simpler.
“Captain!” he greets me, blue antennae fluttering with excitement. “We’ve found the bunkers.” His red uniform is stained with dirt and grime and his silver hair is matted with sweat, but he looks very pleased with himself.
“Oh, excellent work! Where?”
“Site A-9, just like Lieutenant Commander Wen predicted.” His finger jabs at one of the printout maps covering the prefab table, tapping a series of caves just south of what we thought was a former capitol city. “We had to dig through thirty meters of dirt and rubble to find the tunnel entrance, and then it’s another three kilometers underground before you hit the actual structure, but it’s there.”
“Very good work. Please pass my compliments on to Wen as well. Is it……what we thought?” Talpon nods.
“It is. High-level government fallback position where they could wait out the war.” His grin slips. “It looks like they lasted five or six years before the environmental systems fell apart.” I grimace. It’d had probably been more like five or six decades before the surface was habitable again.
“I’m not sure I really want to know more than that” I say.
“Neither am I” admits Talpon. “But Dr. Christopherson is getting his team set up anyways, so I suspect we don’t have a choice.” I sigh. The excitement of the discovery after months of fruitless searching had almost me forget why I was there.
“Well, tell him to get them un-set up. We’ve got new orders from Admiral Kessler.” I hand him the PADD. He reads it and whistles.
“That sounds……remarkably ugly. Even by our standards.”
“Admirably succinct. But irrelevant. Start packing up the equipment and pulling the away teams back to the ship. We’re supposed to hand over the dig sites to a civilian archeological team from Tau Ceti University in seventy-two hours, and I want Anubis ready to break orbit the second that’s done.”
“Understood captain” Talpon salutes. “Off to the next graveyard, hmm?”
“That’s the job” I reply. “That’s what we do.”
The Milky Way galaxy has somewhere between one hundred and four hundred billion star systems. Of these, perhaps one hundred million have planets capable of supporting life. Of these, Starfleet Astography believes that anywhere from 500,000 to one million planets have evolved sentient species. But not all of them make it.
It’s surprisingly easy to destroy a planet. Nature does it all the time—a single asteroid in the right place can blast the entire surface of a world into space, or a large enough volcanic eruption can plunge it into darkness, or a solar flare can scour the continents clean of life. I guess maybe it’s a sign of progress how fast people pick up the trick too.
Atomic weapons can do it easily enough, even little 20 kiloton fission bombs, if you have enough of them. With hydrogen-fusion weapons and ballistic missiles it’s not even that difficult. Biological warfare’s another possibility. The scientists always think they’ve designed enough safeguards, and the viruses always seem to find a way to evolve out from under them. Even something as simple as carbon dioxide. The runaway greenhouse effect can get rolling while a civilization’s just starting to industrialize and by the time anyone realizes what’s happening the climactic shifts are unstoppable.
That’s before you even get into the modern era. Antimatter reactors, neutron bombs, kinetic interdiction strikes, polaric ion energy, tachyon generators, bio-memetic gel, nanobots, singularity generators—the list goes on forever. We’ve dreamed up a lot of ways to destroy ourselves.
Heck, the Cheronites managed to wipe themselves out with chem-fuel projectile weapons, hydrocarbon rockets, blunt instruments, and rocks. Sometimes I think it’s a miracle anyone survives long enough to make it into space.
It’s not something most people like to think about. I don’t blame them. But I have to. That’s what the Ghost Patrol does.
Other ships in Starfleet push the frontier. They explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, boldly go where no man has gone before. We scour the ash heap of history. We search for the failures, the civilizations that lost the war against entropy, the dead planets and extinct species. And then we dig through the rubble to try and find out what happened.
It’s not exactly the most popular mission in Starfleet.
Honestly, it was never something I particularly wanted to do either? It just sort of happened. I was a brand-new Lieutenant Commander on the USS Stalingrad and had just had a horrifically ugly breakup when an opportunity came up for a long-term extended mission to study the ruins of Gehenna VII. Well, anything to get me off the ship for a little while seemed good at the time. Spending six months cataloging what was left after an industrialized civilization fights a religious war to the death with weaponized nano-technology and genetic-mutation bombs normally wouldn’t be very appealing, but I was feeling well-motivated to try and distract myself. My report was very detailed, and very well-received. It was even adapted into an article for that year’s edition of the Daystrom Institute Archeological Council’s Annual Journal! But in Starfleet the reward for a job well-done is always……another job.
I’d picked up a reputation, and it stuck. By the time I made captain and they gave me USS Anubis, it was all but inevitable that I’d get put on the Ghost Patrol.
The Zeta Andromeda system was all the way out on the very fringe of Federation-claimed territory, in the Beta Quadrant marches out beyond the Klingon Empire. Even at Warp 6 it was a two-week journey. That was fine by me. A long trip gave the crew a chance to rest and recuperate, to unwind and release some pressure. Three months digging through the wreckage of a nuclear apocalypse isn’t very relaxing, especially when you know that as soon as you’re done, you’ll be sent off to do the same thing all over again. I set a minimal watch schedule, planned only essential maintenance, and declared an unofficial holiday. The holodecks were full day and night, Commander Talpon organized a parrises squares tournament in one of the aft cargo holds, and Lieutenant Velázquez press-ganged most of engineering into performing a musical version of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which was……interesting, to say the least. Unfortunately, it also gave people a chance to brood.
I find Lieutenant Commander M’Kal, my security officer, watching the long-range scans of Chumkar’s self-destruction on repeat in the conference room. Each time the display cycles, the same pattern: the planet, a swirling orb of dark greens and pale blues rotating slowly. Then, a bright flash along the upper edge of one of the continents, so quick it looks like a recording artifact. A moment of normalcy, then pillars of energy leaping up to mushroom against the top of the planetary atmosphere. The very shape of the planet seems to warp and melt as the impact of the explosion shatters local subspace, and warning lights begin to flash as the sensors overload. Then—darkness. It begins again, and I cough pointedly. M'Kal whirls around with a growl, fur bristling.
“Oh” she says. “It’s you.” I take the seat across from her and raise an eyebrow.
“Do I need to say it?” I ask. I don’t. M’Kal and I have been together for years now. She hisses, but sits back down and flicks off the display screen.
“No captain” she acknowledges with a flip of her ears. After a moment she continues. “Sorry. It’s just…...this one hits a little close to home.” Her claws drummed on the tabletop. “That could just as easily have been Cait.” I nod.
“Or Earth” I reply. “Or Vulcan or Tellar or Bajor. It could have been anyone.” Almost unconsciously we both fall silent, listening to the gentle hum of the warp drive vibrating deep within Anubis’s hull. It’s usually a comforting sound. Right now, it can’t help but feel a little ominous.
Chumkar was first surveyed by the USS Pioneer in 2263, which recorded the existence of a flourishing pre-warp civilization. In 2296 a research station was established on one of the moons of the system’s main gas giant to observe the Chumkari’s development. In 2369 it became clear that they were on the cusp of the breakthrough into warp technology, and the Federation Diplomatic Corps began preparing to dispatch a first contact expedition.
In 2372 that no longer became necessary.
Every starship in space carries the potential to destroy worlds. It’s not something most spacers like to think about.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I ask. M’Kal shakes her head.
“There’s nothing to say” she says. “It just…...gets to you after a while, yes? And this…...this wasn’t some stupid war or unstoppable industrial collapse or anything. They just wanted to see the stars. And they made one mistake and now……they’re gone.” She shivers.
“You’re not wrong” I say quietly. “But we’re still here. And all we can do is our job.”
“I know, I know. It just feels pointless sometimes.”
“Hmmm, I understand that. But—do you remember Doris III? And the Sepulcher of the Angels?” M’Kal snorts, her nostrils flaring.
“How could I forget?” It was a reasonable question. We’d surveyed a lot of dead worlds, but there’s only so many times you drill through two meters of rock trying to trace what you thought was a sewer line only to break through into what was (probably) a species’ most sacred temple. Fifty meters wide, fifty tall, glowing white marble inscribed from floor to ceiling with pictograms and hieroglyphics, blazing with the light of encrusted gemstones.
“Don’t you think the people who carved that would be happy to know it’s not lost? That their work and their beliefs live on, somewhere else in the Galaxy?”
“I suppose so. No, you’re right.” She sighs, a sort of whispered purr. “Sorry captain. I didn’t mean to drop all this on you. It just……it gets to you after a while.”
“Do you want a transfer?” I ask. “You know my policy.” Transfer requests were almost automatically endorsed, with no black marks on the record. This wasn’t the kind of work you could do forever, and I was determined to make sure that any crewmember of mine was allowed to make that decision for themselves. She scowls, hackles rising.
“And leave you to deal with this pzshjok alone? Hell no!” Her ears flatten. “I mean, um, thank you captain, but I must decline your offer.” I smile. Maybe it’s selfish of me, but I’m touched.
“C’mon” I say, rising to my feet. “Enough moping! They should be starting Act Four of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms soon, and Lieutenant Singh is playing Cao Cao. Mr. Velázquez assures he’s been practicing ‘The Lament of Red Cliffs’ all week now.” M’Kal rises but cocks her head curiously.
“I don’t……know what any of that means.”
“Well,” I admit “I don’t really either. Shall we go find out?” We exit the room together, laughing.
It’s even worse in person. I didn’t think that was possible. Chumkar fills the bridge viewscreen, a blasted hellscape of fire and smoke. The continent where the accident occurred is just—gone—molten lava bubbling up through a shattered crust. Elsewhere shockwaves have battered the continents down the bedrock, and clouds of ash and grit hang in the atmosphere. Distortions and bubbles seem to float in the corner of your eye whenever you look at it, artifacts of the damage done to the local space-time continuum.
“Even for a warp core breach that’s……catastrophic” comments Commander Talpon. “Is there any precedent for a disaster on this scale?”
“We’re still waiting to hear back from Memory Alpha but my guess is no” I reply. I turn to my science officer. “Lieutenant Commander Wen, do we know what happened yet?”
“I think so” reports my science officer. “I’ve analyzed the sensor readings we took, and I’m pretty sure they were using a diphasic ionic modulation system.” Lieutenant Velázquez, perched at the engineering repeater station, whistles softly, and I turn to him and raise an eyebrow.
“Ahh, it’s a very efficient process” he says, running his fingers through his hair. “You can generate twice, maybe even three times as much antimatter for less than half the original energy input. But we don’t use it because the cost of all that is that the magnetic containment fields have an inherent flux in them. The chance of a breakdown is just too high.”
“Exactly” Wen nods. “What it looks like is that they had a containment field breach, and tried to prevent the warp core from imploding by pumping in more power to the shields. But that just meant that when the magnetic fields went completely down there was even more matter for the antimatter to react with. The auxiliary reactors blew too, and the initial explosion scattered antimatter across half the continent. Every other power grid and nuclear reactor on the planet probably overloaded within a few minutes, which set off a self-sustaining chain-reaction. And once you’ve detonated that many explosions within a planetary atmosphere, well……the biosphere just isn’t going to handle it well.”
“I don’t suppose there’s any point in looking for survivors then?” I say without much hope. We don’t usually get assigned to missions where that’s a possibility. Wen shakes her head.
“I doubt anything larger than a Felosian fieldmouse survived ma’am” she says. “At least on land. The oceans may have provided enough insulation to protect some larger sea life in the deeper sectors.” I nod, unsurprised.
“Well then” I say. “We might as well begin then.” Footsteps patter as my bridge crew return to their stations, but nobody begins working yet. I punch a command into the arm of my command chair, sending the image of the murdered planet to every display screen on the ship. I flick a switch, opening the ship-wide intercom circuit and sending the attention signal. I know that on every deck, everyone not standing a critical watch is gathering. “This is Chumkar” I say at last. “This was a world, with billions of people, with hopes and dreams and fears and a future. It is gone now. But we remain.” There is silence on the bridge, and on the rest of the ship too. “It is our task to not forget what has come before. It is our purpose to keep their memory alive. Remember that.” I bow my head and recite what I always recite before one of our missions. “Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba b’alma di v’ra chir’utei; v’yamlich malchutei b’hayeichon u-v’yomeichon, uv’hayei d’chol beit yisrael, ba-agala u-vi-z’man kariv, v’imru amen.” I let the silence return, broken only by the humming of the engines.
The truth is, I don’t mind being on the Ghost Patrol circuit. It’s ugly, depressing work, and sometimes it’s enough to make you wish Starfleet hadn’t banned real alcohol on its ships. You spend your days wallowing in the worst of the Galaxy while other ships soar past you to discover its wonders. It can make you bitter, cynical, give you a morbid sense of humor that gets you sidelong glances from the other captains at command conferences. But—well, it’s a cliché, but it’s true—somebody has to do it. Magnified and sanctified is the great name of God throughout the world, which was created according to Divine will. I don’t believe in God, not the way my ancestors who spoke that prayer at funerals and yahrzeits did, but I believe in—well, sanctity I suppose. The existence of any one individual is a miracle, the defiance of a Universe that doesn’t go out of its way to make it easy for us, the result of a million coincidences aligning precisely. Any death is a tragedy too vast to be encompassed with mere words. But as long as someone remembers you, you’re not totally dead. As long as someone lights you a candle or says Kaddish for you, part of you still lingers. It’s the only immortality we’re ever going to get. And that’s what we do in the Ghost Patrol. We witness for those with no one left to speak for them.
I let the silence linger for a precise two minutes.
“As you were” I say, and turn off the intercom. “Now, Ensign Kuruvila? Take us into orbit. Maintain a distance of at least ten million kilometers until we have a better chart of those subspace distortions.”
“Aye ma’am!”
“Lieutenant Commander Wen, launch a pair of Class 3 recon probes to begin intensive scanning on the planet’s atmosphere and surface. I’m not risking any manned missions until we have a lot more data. M'Kal! While she’s doing that, please begin taking an inventory of our environmental suits and prefab shelters. It sounds like surface conditions are going to be pretty rough.”
“Understood captain!”
“Commander Talpon, please meet me in my ready room. I want to begin putting together an outline for crew assignments. I think we’ll want at least three shifts but—”
One thing about this job? It gives you a sense of perspective. I dedicated my heart and soul to Starfleet and the Federation, but I know that nothing we build will last forever. It’s just the way of things. Entropy eventually wins all battles. All civilizations falter, all worlds die, all empires collapse. You do what you can, live your life, try the make the Galaxy a little better, and try not to think about it too much. But someday, in the distant future—hopefully the very distant future—it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that some alien archeologists will be digging through the ruins of Starfleet Headquarters in San Francisco, trying to learn who we were, what we believed in, how we died.
I wish them all the best.