Текст книги "Declassified "

Автор книги: David Mack

Соавторы: Marco Palmieri,Dayton Ward
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Текущая страница: 24 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

14

In all his years of piloting small starships, Quinn had never heard anything like the din surrounding him as the Dulcineahurtled in a mad spiral through the wormhole. The ship’s hull moaned like an angry ghost, her engines screamed like frightened children, and her consoles crackled and spat sparks every which way.

Despite his best efforts to control the ship’s wild pitching and rolling, it grazed the blinding, blue-white swirl of the wormhole’s membrane and then caromed off, its movement made even more erratic by the fleeting impact.

A hiccup in the inertial dampers or artificial gravity (or some other system Quinn always took for granted until it was gone) knocked Bridy on her ass. Clawing her way up from the deck, she growled, “Dammit! Keep her steady!”

He glared at her. “Great idea, sweetheart! Why didn’t Ithink of that?”

“Watch our yaw!”

Quinn keyed compensating maneuvers into the helm faster than he’d ever done before, but the ship reacted like a turtle slogging through mud. No matter how hard Quinn tried to get ahead of the wormhole’s horrendous gravitational distortions, he remained fractions of a second too slow to prevent the worst from coming to pass. He grabbed his armrests. “Hang on!”

Dulcineacareened off the side of the wormhole’s throat. A screech of stressed metal was drowned out by a deafening boom of collision. Overhead lights and console displays stuttered and went dark, leaving the cockpit illuminated by the spectral blue radiance of the wormhole.

Bridy stretched past Quinn to reach the copilot’s console, her movements strobed by the wormhole’s flickering light. Then she patched in the ship’s auxiliary power, restoring the lights and most of the controls. “Mains are fried,” she shouted over the howling chaos. “Losing antimatter containment!”

Dead ahead, the terminus of the wormhole was little more than a pinprick of white light at the end of a churning maelstrom. “Just give me a few more seconds!”

“We won’t make it!” She armed the fuel-pod-ejection trigger.

“Don’t! We’re almost clear!” Space-time distortions rocked the ship as the wormhole’s far mouth spun open, spat it out, and sent it tumbling madly into a firestorm. All Quinn could see outside the cockpit was half-molten rocky debris, glowing-hot clouds of ionized gas, and multihued flashes of lightning.

Every gauge in the cockpit redlined. “Containment’s failing,” Bridy said as she ejected the ship’s antimatter supply.

“All power to shields!”

“Patching in reserves.”

The universe flared white, and then a thunderclap pummeled Quinn like a sonic hammer. All around him, the ship’s onboard systems let out sad, whimpering noises before expiring with a slowly fading hum. At least the helm’s still responding,Quinn consoled himself—before it, too, began deteriorating. Coaxing every bit of performance possible from his wounded vessel, he guided it through a passage between two quarters of a shattered planet whose scattered chunks were gradually being pulled away from one another. Dulcineatrembled as boulder-sized hunks of rock and ice were deflected by its navigational force field.

Without taking his eyes off their perilous environment, Quinn said to Bridy, “I need a damage report, a-sap.”

“On it.” She got up and moved from one cockpit console to another. “Warp drive’s down. We’ve got a few minutes before the impulse coil fails. Life support’s barely there. And we lost the subspace antenna.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. What about the cargo?”

“It’s fine.”

“All right, then. We just need to find a place to set down and patch this ol’ girl back together.” Outside, the haze of radiant dust began to dim. “We’re almost out of this soup. See if you can get the sensors running and find us a planet—preferably one with a breathable atmosphere.”

Bridy was staring slackjawed into space. “Uh, Quinn . . . ?”

“What?”

“Look.”

He followed her gaze. “I don’t see anything.”

“Exactly.”

When he turned his attention back to the view outside the ship, he understood. Then his jaw dropped half open in shock. “There are no stars.” Beholding the empty heavens with dread, he muttered, “Where the hell are we?”

Bridy looked perplexed. “No idea. We might be so far from the center of the universe that none of its light has reached here yet, or we might be in a pocket universe branched off from our own.”

“A universe with no stars? Eternal darkness? I’m not what you’d call a believer, but are you sure we didn’t die and go to hell?”

“No, I’m not.” Bridy perked up as she pointed at the sensor display. “Hang on, correction: There isone star—a white dwarf, temperature ninety-seven hundred Kelvin. Bearing one-seven-seven mark one-five-oh, distance one hundred eight-point-six million kilometers.” She cast a fearful glance at Quinn. “And it has one planet, orbiting at a distance of five-point-two-four million kilometers, right in the middle of the habitable zone. Atmosphere is M-Class nitrogen-oxygen.” Then she called up another screen of data, which showed a familiar energy waveform. “It’s the Jinoteur Pattern. And guess where it’s coming from.”

Quinn swallowed, only to find it difficult because his mouth had gone dry. “What do you wanna bet that ain’t a coincidence?”

“You know we have to go down there. We need to track this to its source.”

“Dammit, I knew you’d say that. Not that we have much choice. We need to get this busted bird planetside on the double.” He sighed, then plotted a heading to the signal’s point of origin. “It’s gonna be a rough landing, honey. You’d better make sure everything’s still tied down and shut tight.”

Bridy got up, took one step aft, then stopped. “I’ve seen you botch normal landings when the ship wasn’tfried. Are you sure you can do this?”

“Positive.”

“Without getting us killed, I mean.”

“Ask me again in thirty minutes.”

Twenty-nine minutes and thirty seconds later, Bridy was too busy hyperventilating to ask Quinn much of anything.

Turbulence buffeted the Dulcineaas it arrowed through the upper atmosphere of the white dwarf’s solitary, tiny planet. Critical failures cascaded through the ship’s major systems, leaving only maneuvering thrusters and the primary sensors functioning for what promised to be a brutal planetfall.

Quinn shouted over the roar of wind and engines, “How’s the signal?”

“Five by five.” Bridy checked its origin against the ship’s heading. “Dead ahead, range nine hundred sixty kilometers.”

“Right.” He started flipping toggles on the helm. “Braking thrusters in ten seconds.” The ship pierced a thick layer of cloud cover and then leveled out above a desolate, arctic plain. Massive peaks of jagged black stone made Bridy think of daggers thrust up by a giant’s hand through the planet’s snowy surface. Studying the wild landscape, Quinn frowned. “Not many good places to land.”

“I’ll watch the ground, you watch the instruments.”

“I would if they still worked.” He slammed his palm against the console in front of him, but his attempt at percussive maintenance seemed to have no effect. “How’s the ground looking?”

“A lot closer than it did five seconds ago.”

He primed the braking thrusters. “Hold on to your ass.”

The engines boomed, and the rapid deceleration threw them forward. Bridy winced as her seat’s safety harness straps dug into her chest. Outside the cockpit the landscape spun, black rock and white ice melting into a gray blur.

Bridy pointed at a fleeting image of level ground. “There!”

“Too far!” Quinn fought with the ship’s controls to little apparent effect. “Main thruster’s gone! We got five seconds to set down before we falldown!”

“Starboard! Get the nose up!”

She grabbed the console white-knuckle tight.

Quinn pulled the ship through a hard turn that arrested most of its forward momentum. Dulcinea’s landing thrusters sputtered erratically as Quinn guided it to a mountainside ledge barely as wide as the ship itself. All at once the engines cut off, and the ship dropped the last half meter onto a deep bed of ice-crusted snow. The thud of impact reverberated and then stopped—enabling Bridy to hear a low, dangerous rumbling from high overhead. She and Quinn looked up in unison through the top of the cockpit’s canopy at the snow-capped peak looming over their precarious perch. They waited for several seconds, neither speaking nor breathing, while waiting to see whether the mountain would welcome the Dulcineaby burying it. Then the distant tremor faded, leaving only the faint creaking of the ship’s overtaxed hull as it settled into its new resting place.

Their wide-open eyes remained fixed on the mountaintop.

Bridy’s voice was barely a whisper. “So . . . thathappened.”

Quinn rose from his chair and trod cautiously aft. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to go have a short nervous breakdown.”

15

Bundled in cold-weather clothing and laden with arctic climbing equipment that had been stowed by SI in the Dulcinea’s hold (along with gadgets and gear for just about every other terrain and scenario Quinn could ever imagine), Quinn trudged away from the slope of the mountain in pursuit of Bridy. Screaming wind whipped grains of ice against the few bits of exposed flesh on his face, forcing him to dip his chin and watch his legs chop through knee-deep snow.

He clenched his jaw against the cold. “Are we there yet?”

“If you ask me that one more time, I’ll smash this tricorder over your head.” She led him across a level and nearly circular plain several kilometers in diameter and ringed by steep black peaks like the one they’d descended after leaving the Dulcinea. The mountains hid the sunset, which painted the sky in shades of violet.

Bridy pointed forward. “The signal’s coming from underground, inside some caves beyond the other side of this frozen lake. Another hour’s walk, tops.”

Quinn harrumphed from behind his air-warming face mask. “Remind me not to use you as my tour guide the next time I plan a vacation.”

“Do you ever stop complaining?”

“I was fine till you made me leave the ship.”

“I didn’t makeyou leave the ship. We decided to track the signal.”

“No, youdecided to track the signal. I wanted to fix the impulse coils.”

She sighed. “Get serious, they’re fried. We’ll need a starbase for that.”

“That’s what you said about the thrusters, but I got those working.”

“Yeah, and if you’d used them, you’d have triggered an avalanche and buried us—not to mention the caves where the signal’s coming from.”

“Which is why we’re walking instead of flying. Of course, if we’d fixed the transporter, we could’ve just beamed over there.”

“I don’t know how to fix a transporter, and neither do you.”

“No, but we have a manual. We could figure it out.” He scowled. “Why is it whenever we disagree we always end up doing things your way?”

She glanced back at him. “Because I’m in charge.”

“Then why even ask my opinion?”

“To make you feel better.”

“Well, it ain’t workin’.”

They didn’t speak to each other the rest of the way across the lake. Quinn tried to keep up with Bridy, but she outpaced him enough to open her lead by slow degrees. By the time they reached the far side of the crater-shaped basin, she was twenty meters ahead of him, and she showed no sign of slowing down as she pressed forward into the mouth of a cave. She was limned by the pale glow of her tricorder and partly silhouetted by the beam of her small flashlight as she forged ahead into the dark.

Quinn was about to shout her name when he remembered that a sudden loud noise echoing off the mountains above them might prove disastrous.

Dammit,he cursed her in his imagination, don’t do nothin’ stupid.

He quickened his pace until he reached the cave, and then he stopped to fish his own flashlight from his jacket pocket. His gloved hands fumbled first to find the device and then to activate it. Its narrow beam slashed through the darkness as he pivoted side to side, surveying the path ahead. It was a wide space populated by stalactites, stalagmites, and pillars of dark-blue ice. He glimpsed another, smaller passage on the cavern’s far side, but there was no obvious clear path to it—only routes of greater or lesser resistance.

To his dismay, he saw no sign of Bridy.

Then he heard a weak and distant echo of her voice: “Quinn!”

“Honey? Where are you?” She called his name again, but he wasn’t sure from what direction. “Keep talkin’, darlin’! I’m comin’!” Bridy repeated his name; it sounded as if it had come from beneath him. He prowled about the cavern, searching its floor with his flashlight beam.

He stumbled to a halt half a step shy of a narrow crevasse. Kneeling beside it, he aimed the flashlight into its depths and called, “Bridy?”

“Down here!”

Targeting her voice, he trained the flashlight beam on her. She was a dozen meters below him and wedged between two walls of rough, black ice.

“You okay?”

“I think my leg’s broken.”

“Yeah, that first step’s a doozy.” He removed his pack and retrieved the spare coil of climbing rope. “Hang on. I’ll have you up in a few minutes.” Fumbling to untie the simple knot on the coil, he silently cursed his bulky gloves for making his fingers so clumsy. As the synthetic-fiber rope unspooled onto the cavern floor, he called back to Bridy, “Try not to move.”

“Not much risk of that.”

Recalling his mercenary training from decades earlier, Quinn secured one end of the rope with a set of strong knots to the thickest ice pillar within a few meters of the crevasse, and ran the line behind another sturdy pillar to serve as a crude pulley. Then he paid out a few dozen meters of slack over the fissure’s edge, lowering it to Bridy. “Secure that around your torso in an X shape, and through your legs if you can reach.”

“Under the shoulders will have to do.”

“That’s fine. Let me know when you’re ready to come up.”

A minute later, Bridy tugged on the rope. “Let’s do this.”

Quinn leaned back and started pulling on the rope. Slack gathered in his hands, and he coiled it around his left arm while hoisting Bridy back to the top of the crevasse. Bridy was a slender woman, but the effort of lifting her as dead weight was exhausting. As she clambered over the edge onto the cavern’s floor, Quinn gave a few more heroic tugs on the rope to pull her to safety.

Then he fell on his ass and gasped for air. His exhaled breath gathered in a wispy cloud around his head while he waited for his limbs to stop shaking.

Bridy lay on her back a few meters away, clearly in no hurry to move, either. In a droll deadpan she said, “Don’t have a heart attack, okay?”

“Tryin’ not to, darlin’.” After a few more pained breaths, he sat up. “We should patch up your leg. Where’s the medkit?”

She nodded at her torn-up backpack. “At the bottom of the crevasse.”

“Of course it is.”

“Along with my tricorder.”

He scowled. “Anything you didn’tlose?”

“Just my good looks.”

“And your sense of humor.” He got up and moved to her side. “But I don’t think you’ll be laughing for long.” With a gingerly touch, he examined her injured leg and paid attention to her pained reactions. “The good news is you’ve got a simple fracture. The bad news is we’ll have to treat it the old-fashioned way.”

Bridy grimaced. “This is gonna hurt, isn’t it?”

“Oh, hell yeah. In a few seconds you’ll wish I still carried a flask.” He removed his gloves, then clapped his hands and set them in position. “Ready?”

“No. Do it anyway.”

“All right. I’m gonna count to three, okay?” Bridy nodded. “One.” He jerked the broken halves of her tibia back into alignment with one quick pull.

Bridy’s piercing scream of pain filled the cavern. Then she punched Quinn in the shoulder hard enough to knock him down. “Asshole! You said on three!”

“No, I said I was gonna countto three. Never said when I was gonna set the bone. Oh, and by the way—two.”

“Say ‘three’ and I’ll knock your teeth out.”

Quinn recoiled in mock indignation, one hand on his chest. “Is that any way to treat the guy who has to carry you back to the ship?”

“I’m not going back to the ship. Not yet, anyway.”

“Why? You got a death wish or something?”

“The source of that signal is less than two hundred meters from here, straight down that passage. I didn’t come all this way to turn back now.”

“You keep saying that, but I don’t think you realize how crazy it sounds.”

“If you’re willing to carry me to the ship, then a few hundred yards more won’t matter, will it?”

He started gathering up the rope. “What if we aren’t alone down here? Have you thought of that? If we get into trouble, how can we retreat if you can’t even walk?” He stopped and faced her. “Hell, even if we arealone down here, what’s the point of finding the signal source when we don’t have a tricorder?”

“Dammit, I just want to seeit. Let’s do a quick recon. Then we can head back to the ship, fix my leg, and come back with the spare tricorder.”

He put away the coiled rope and sealed his pack. “If this all goes wrong, do I get to say ‘I told you so’?”

“No.”

“Let me rephrase: Do you want to crawl the rest of the way?” She seethed for a moment. “All right, you can say it once. Now, can we please get this show on the road?”

“Your wish is my command.” He took her hand, helped her up, and draped her arm across his shoulders so he could support her weight. They moved together, taking care to synchronize their strides.

Bridy wore an amused expression. “You shouldn’t be such a pessimist. What’re you gonna say if we end up making the greatest discovery of our lives?”

“That’s easy,” Quinn said. “ I get half.”

Ten minutes later, Bridy clung to Quinn’s shoulder as they stood at the end of the downward-sloped passageway, facing a wall of ice at least a dozen meters thick.

Quinn frowned. “Hmph. I’d call this a sign.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s just a minor obstacle.”

“Honey, it’s a wall of ice. To me, that says, ‘Do not enter.’ ”

“Oh, come on.” She gestured at the dark, semitransparent barrier. “I can see flickers of light from the other side. Whatever we came to find is there.”

“Sure it is. But I don’t feel like hacking my way through the galaxy’s biggest ice cube to get to it”—he nodded at her broken leg—“especially since I’d be doin’ all the work, on account of you being a gimp.”

She rolled her eyes. “I swear, sometimes it’s like you forget we live in the twenty-third century.” Then she drew her phaser, set it for wide beam and high power, and fired at the ice. The blue beam lit up the ice for a fraction of a second, and then the frozen wall transformed into a dense cloud of sultry, gray vapor. Seconds later, the hiss of boiling water ceased, and Bridy took her thumb off the phaser’s trigger.

He scowled. “Oh, well, sure. If you’re gonna cheat.”

“Let’s go.”

Quinn helped her forward through the curtains of mist. Eerie, nigh-musical oscillations emanated from the chamber ahead of them, and an unearthly glow pierced the thinning fog as they neared the threshold of a vast cavern.

The first thing Bridy saw was the machine.

Every piece of it was in motion. Delicate elements composed of silvery crystal spun at many different speeds on a variety of planes, all orbiting a core consisting of equal parts hard angles and fluid curves. Ribbons of prismatic energy snaked through the machine’s open spaces, crisscrossing one another’s paths, sometimes intersecting in flashes of white light.

Rotating in the center of all that motion was an object unlike any Bridy had ever seen. Made of the same silvery crystal as the rest of the machine, the core element was in a constant state of flux, expanding into dramatic stellations of varying complexity and reverting to a simple icosahedron once every several seconds before repeating the cycle of transformations.

Warmth radiated from the titanic device. As she and Quinn drew nearer to it, Bridy noticed a profound galvanic tingling traveling across her body.

She looked away from the machine only because Quinn pulled urgently on her coat sleeve. “Um, honey?” Bridy turned, looked at him, and then shifted her attention to see what he was pointing at.

Her jaw went slack as she beheld the most beautiful and terrifying being she’d ever encountered: a giant nearly seven meters tall, its body formed from multicolored mist that concealed its lower half. A brilliant glow obscured its face, streams of shimmering motes circled its torso, and a great halo of golden light framed its head. As clouds of vapor rolled behind its back, Bridy saw fleeting glimpses of majestic shapes she was almost certain could only be wings.

Its voice was a stroke of thunder and the roar of the sea. “Welcome.”

Quinn whispered to Bridy, “Is that what I think it is?”

“I think it is.”

The resplendent colossus interjected, “Yes. I am Shedai.”It spread its arms. “It is I who summoned you, and who have awaited your coming.”

Bridy took a cautious step toward the towering being. “I’ve seen your kind before. Which one are you?”

“I am the Apostate.”