He broke off at an alarm from his console. “Bozhe moi. There’s a small city, Midoren, on the edge of the emergence area. One of the wormhole clusters has passed through it!”

“Damage?” Terrell asked.

Chekov tightened the scan, adjusting the frequencies and detection protocols. “Extensive disruption to the power grid. Electrical discharges and blowouts. Vehicle crashes. It’s night there, but Denobulans rarely sleep.” He looked up at Terrell. “A few building collapses. The wormholes must have caused structural damage, or the thermal shock to the atmosphere may have—”

“It doesn’t matter why,” Azem-Os interrupted. “We need to help those people. Can we transport the injured?”

“There’s heavy interference,” Chekov told her. “We’d have to get within… approximately eight hundred kilometers.”

The Aurelian stepped forward to the helm station and leaned over Beach. “Stoney, can you get us in closer?”

“Up to a point, Commander, but there’s no predicting where a new surge might pop up.”

“That’s a risk we have to take,” Terrell told him, backing up his first officer. “Just stay alert.” He descended to his command chair and activated the comm switch. “Terrell to sickbay. Doctor Wilder, stand by to receive casualties. And we’re going to need medical and rescue teams on the ground.”

While the captain coordinated with sickbay, Chekov studied the worrying seismic readings from Midoren. A thought struck him, and he ran some quick computations to support it. Once the captain was done speaking, he called out across the bridge to the weapons station. “Nizhoni! I think we can damp the ground tremors with a tractor beam. I’m sending the parameters to gravity control, but you’ll need to ride them manually.”

“On it,” the long-haired tactical officer said, crossing the front of the bridge to the stand-up gravity control station just starboard of the main viewscreen. Within moments, she had locked Reliant’s powerful tractor beams onto the surface near Midoren, spreading out their focus and fine-tuning their gravitational energies to damp the tremors endangering the city. Chekov saw her smile, and as a former tactical officer himself, he understood her pleasure at being able to use her targeting skills to protect lives rather than take them.

“In transporter range,” Beach called out.

“Transporter rooms report evac underway,” Kyle announced a moment later.

Terrell’s eyes were on the vast field of quantum fireworks that filled the space above the planet surface. “I don’t like being this close to that thing. The faster we get those people out, the better.”

“The planet should be clear of the effect in another minute or so,” Chekov said. “Barring aftershocks, we’ll be able to focus on putting out the fires in its wake—literal or otherwise.”

“It’s lucky it didn’t hit the main population center,” Terrell said. “Nearly twelve billion people packed over such a small percentage of the planet.”