Текст книги "Twilight "

Автор книги: David George

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Текущая страница: 25 (всего у книги 42 страниц)

As Vaughn approached, he saw Prynn standing over ch’Thane, a tricorder in her hand, no doubt checking his condition. The ensign lay on his back now atop one of the bedrolls, wrapped in a thin metallic blanket that confined his body heat and kept him warm. Vaughn had treated ch’Thane’s fractured leg—as well as his dislocated shoulder, three bruised ribs, and numerous cuts and contusions—as best he could, but damage to one of the young Andorian’s less identifiable organs demanded more medical knowledge and ability than either he or Prynn had. They had stabilized the ensign enough to move him onto the bedding, though, and his vital signs had improved somewhat. He had even shown indications of reviving, but Vaughn had decided to administer an anesthetic, to keep him both unconscious and out of pain. Ch’Thane appeared to be out of immediate danger, but Vaughn knew that he would require a doctor’s attention soon.

“How is he?” he asked Prynn. She looked much better now, after Vaughn had tended to her bumps and bruises, and after she had cleaned herself up. He had been able to heal almost all of her thankfully superficial injuries, with the exception of the one to her eye. The deep red surrounding her dark iris and black pupil made the eye appear opaque and therefore blind, but her vision actually remained unaffected.

“He’s the same,” she said, answering him across ch’Thane’s body. A gust of wind blew past, and she pulled the collar of her jacket up higher.

Vaughn peered down at the young man, whose usually bright blue skin had grown dull. “He’s lucky to be alive,” he said. “We’re all lucky to—” Vaughn stopped as he looked up at Prynn and saw tears in her eyes. She turned away from him and moved a few paces away.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She raised her arm, and Vaughn assumed she was wiping away her tears. He heard her breathe in slowly and deeply, then she dropped her arm and turned back around. “It’s just that…we were friends,” she said. “Becoming friends, anyway.”

Vaughn thought that there was probably even more to it than that; just before he had arrived at Deep Space 9, the station had been attacked, and Prynn had lost coworkers and friends, one of whom she had been very close to. Now he wanted to go to his daughter and wrap his arms around her, hold her and tell her that everything would be all right. But apart from all that had come between them over the years, he understood that she needed something other than that right now. “Ensign Tenmei,” he said gently, “we weren’t…lucky…were we?” He emphasized the word by isolating it.

“We werelucky,” Prynn said, pushing the tricorder closed and slipping it into a jacket pocket. “But not justlucky.”

Vaughn nodded. He told her what he had seen—what he had failedto see—in the downed shuttle’s wake. “How did you do it?” he asked, genuinely curious, but also wanting her to focus on her involvement in their survival.

“It’s an old shuttle pilot’s trick,” she said, and for the first time since the crash, she seemed to perk up. “There are certain maneuvers you can make with a crippled shuttle…at the end, the antigravs saved us.”

“Antigravs don’t work at speed,” Vaughn noted.

“We decelerated as we broke apart, and I used the emergency thrusters to brake us even more at the right moment,” she explained. “Then I overcharged the antigravs. It’s a split-second timing thing. They call it the ‘Sulu Shuttle Stunt.’” Vaughn nodded, impressed. He recognized what Prynn had described so matter-offactly as a maneuver that even the best shuttle pilots would fail to perform successfully nine times out of ten. She really is exceptional,he thought, and he told her so, making sure to speak as her commanding officer, and not as a proud father.

“Thank you,” she said, accepting the compliment graciously. Vaughn opted not to ask her for whom the “old shuttle pilot’s trick” had been named, Hikaru or Demora. He had known them both, and neither answer would have surprised him. Instead, he handed her one of the beacons.

“Here,” he said. “I thought these might be useful.” Prynn took the beacon, found its activation switch, and turned it on. A powerful beam of white light emerged. She shined it at the ground around her feet, and then off into the distance; even in the dim daylight, it had a considerable range.

Vaughn walked around Ensign ch’Thane. He set the other two beacons down, then grabbed a bedroll and lowered himself into a sitting position on it. “We need to discuss what we’re going to do,” he told Prynn. She switched the beacon off and set it down with the others.

“I’ve actually had some thoughts about that,” she said, pulling the tricorder back out of her jacket. She opened the device and worked its controls. “I scanned the rear section of the shuttle, and it just might be possible to scrounge enough salvageable components from different systems to repair the transporter.” Transporter technology, Vaughn knew from Prynn’s record, had been a secondary area of concentration for her during her Starfleet service. “We obviously wouldn’t be able to beam back to the ship through the clouds, and with the levels of the energy at the source of the pulse, I’m not sure how close we could get to there, but we might be able to get clos er.”

As a commander, Vaughn listened to Prynn’s proposal with satisfaction, pleased simply in terms of her professionalism. Here was an officer actively seeking a solution to their dilemma, and though her thoughts had turned to preservation of the away team, they had also included an attempt to find a means of completing their mission. “How long would that take, and how likely is it to work?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, studying the tricorder. “Based on the readings of the wreckage, I’d guess about a day.” She looked up. “But I can’t really tell how close it would be able to get us to the pulse,” she admitted.

Vaughn turned his head away from her and peered off into the distance, integrating her comments into the framework he had already developed for the continuation of their mission. His eyes found the still-burning husk of Chaffee’s cockpit, and he watched the bounding flames as they persisted in birthing the rising black smoke. Not far from there, he saw the fire-suppression canister still lying where he had dropped it earlier.

Finally, Vaughn looked back up at Prynn. “Yes, try to get the transporter working,” he told her. “If the pulse can’t be stopped, we have no idea what effect it will have on the surface of the planet, but it’d probably be a good idea to get as far away from it as possible.”

Prynn’s brow knitted in obvious puzzlement. “You don’t want to use the transporter to try to get closer to the pulse?” she asked.

“If you can make it work in time to make a difference,” Vaughn said, “then yes, you should try it.”

“Ishould try it?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “In the meantime, I’m going to try to get there on foot.”

“You’re going to walk there?” she asked, her voice rising in surprise. “Alone?”

“Somebody needs to tend to Ensign ch’Thane,” he said, glancing over at the unconscious Andorian. “And you’ll also be working on the transporter.”

Prynn seemed to consider this, and then she asked, “How far is it?”

“Based on the levels of the interference,” he said, “I think somewhere between fifty and two hundred fifty kilometers. But it’s impossible to know for sure.”

Prynn let out a long, heavy breath. “Two hundred fifty kilometers in two and a half days?” she said doubtfully. “You’ll never make that, even under the best conditions.”

“Which is why I’m hoping that the distance is closer to fifty kilometers,” he said. He chose not to address the fact that, even if he made it to the location in time, he still had no idea how—or even if—he would be able to prevent the next occurrence of the pulse; all along, they had known that they would have to learn what they could when they got there, and hope that they could improvise a solution.

Vaughn stood up and faced Prynn. “If you succeed with the transporter, and if you can beam yourself close to the pulse, then do so,” he said. “Otherwise, get yourself and Ensign ch’Thane as far away as possible. Whether or not we stop the pulse, the crew will finish repairing Saganin a few more days, and they’ll send it down to look for us.” He did not bother to add that if they could not stop the pulse they would have to survive its effects in order to be rescued, something far from sure, considering that the planet was completely devoid of animal life.

“All right,” Prynn said, accepting his orders. Her features fell still, her expression unreadable.

“If I can stop the pulse, or if I can’t but I somehow survive it,” he said, “then I’ll come back here.”

“All right,” she said again, still stone-faced. Vaughn wished he knew what she was thinking. He understood the familiar and troubling echo she must be hearing from seven years ago. It doesn’t matter,he told himself. Not now.They each would do what was required of them in order to try to save the Vahni Vahltupali. “When will you go?” she asked.

“Now,” he said. “I just need to gather some provisions.”

“I’ll get the rations,” she said. She went over to the survival cache, opened the lid of the locker, and reached inside. Vaughn watched her for a moment, then gathered the few items he had decided to take with him on his trek: a bedroll, a beacon, one of the metallic blankets; he already carried a tricorder and a phaser. He wrapped the beacon and the blanket inside the bedroll, then affixed the lightweight bundle to his back, fastening with bands across his shoulders. Prynn returned with a dozen thin, metallic envelopes, along with two containers of water. Vaughn deposited the rations envelopes in various pockets of his coat, and slipped the carry straps of the water containers over his shoulders.

“I’ll report approximately every hour,” he said. Although Vaughn’s combadge had been the only one not lost in the crash, they had found several others in the survival cache, and Prynn now wore one on her jacket. “With the interference from the energy, I’m not sure how long we’ll be able to communicate.”

“I understand,” she said simply. A silence fell that Vaughn found awkward, and he found himself at a loss for something to say. Finally, Prynn said, “Good luck.”

“You too, Prynn,” he said. He looked in her eyes, her injured sclera changing her appearance dramatically. He pulled out his tricorder and began scanning. He studied the readout, then turned with the tricorder held out in front of him, searching for the highest level of interference. When he found it, he started walking in that direction, leaving Prynn behind him.

For the first time in a very long time, he did not look back.

37

Dax drifted through the pools in the Caves of Mak’ala.

No, not drifted. Floated. Swam.Pushed.

Daxpushed through the murky waters, the usually gentle, welcoming pools now impeding progress. The cool, damp air above stagnated as well, resisting any movement through it. A difficult tranquillity reigned.

Dax sent out a message, but the blue-white veins of energy died quickly, reaching nowhere, and nobody. The pools sat strangely still, absent not only of other symbionts, Dax realized, but seemingly of existence itself. Somehow, the life-carrying waters, and perhaps even the caves, had slipped beyond the universe.

A shadow fell, gray and mysterious. Dax felt it as it stole light and heat, an unexpected eclipse. The darkness descended on the pools, and Dax dived down—pushed down– suddenly desperate to escape the clutches of the unsettling pall. But the dim mantle pushed down too, roiling the waters. A distant siren sang, a lonely echo in the churning flow of this other existence. Dax tumbled, end over end, side over side, tossed about by the pulsing movements. The memory of the motion sickness that once afflicted Ezri rose and—

Ezri.

Ezri was here, Dax knew. Ezri Tigan. The next host. Or the previous one. Dax could not remember. The current host… the current host…

There was no current host. Dax was Dax, and only Dax.

But how could that be? There had been hosts, and if they had gone, then there could only be death. Pain, and then death.

Dax reeled, mentally, emotionally, physically. The beclouded pools spun, eddies and gyres pulling Dax down deep into the gray waters. Pulling Ezri down—

Ezri was drowning.

And Dax knew. Death enveloped Ezri, surrounded her, and yet Dax would go on. But that was not the compact Dax had made. Ezri would protect the symbiont, and Dax would protect the host.

The waters grew heavy with their motion, oppressing even as they promised release. A new life, a new existence called… acherished existence… but none of that mattered. Only Ezri mattered.

Dax drifted upward. Floated. Swam.Pushed.

Dax struggled, understanding that the struggle would be the life or death of both of them. Accepted that.Cherished that.

Ezri, Dax cried, and fought to find her in the growing shadows.

Ezri Dax regained consciousness in the medical bay for the second time in a week. She recognized her surroundings immediately. The quality of the light shined differently here than in the rest of the ship, both a bit brighter and a bit harsher. The diagnostic scanner mounted in the bulkhead above her beat in time with her heart. And of the voices she heard, one belonged to Julian.

This time in the medical bay, his was the first face she saw. “Can you hear me?” he asked gently, his dark, handsome features drifting into sight above her.

“Yes,” she tried to say, but her tongue felt thick and slow in her mouth, and the sound she produced only approximated the word. She tried to concentrate on speaking, on coordinating the muscles of her mouth, and realized that her mind seemed thick and slow as well.

“Slowly,” Julian said, and a warm feeling filled Ezri as a smile bloomed on her face.

Slow,she thought ponderously, is all I can do.She sensed herself floating back down into the folds of unconsciousness, and she fought to remain awake. Her eyes closed, and she forced them open again. “Yes,” she pronounced deliberately. “I can hear you.”

“Good,” Julian said. His eyes sparkled above a thin, tight-lipped smile she had seen many times before. He was pleased, she could tell, but also worried and unsure.

“What…what happened?” she wanted to know, still struggling to swim up to full consciousness.

“Later,” Julian told her. He reached up and laid his strong hand atop hers, the warmth of his touch almost overwhelming her. Her vision blurred, and a tear spilled from each eye, down the sides of her face.

“Julian,” she said. She pushed her body to move. She turned her hand over so that she could take hold of his. He glanced down for a moment, and then she felt him squeeze. He smiled again, but fully this time, with no reservations or concerns—only with love. “What happened?” she repeated.

“You need to rest now,” he told her. “We can discuss it later.”

“No,” Ezri said with as much vigor as she could marshal. “Tell me now, Doctor.”

“I’m afraid you’re off duty, Lieutenant,”he said, a sternness and seriousness underscoring his words. She was in the medical bay, it occurred to her, with no memory of how she had gotten here, and so of course Julian must be upset about whatever had happened. But that only strengthened her resolve to learn what had taken place.

“Julian, I needto know what happened,” she said, imploring him to talk to her.

He breathed in and out deeply through his nose, his nostrils flaring. “You’ve been in a coma for several hours,” he finally told her. “I was barely able to keep you alive.” He glanced up and over her head, probably at the diagnostic panel. When he looked back down, he said, “Frankly, I’m not even sure how I was able to bring you out of the coma.”

“You didn’t,” she said without thinking. She lifted herself up off the bed, sliding her elbows back underneath her and propping herself up. Her head spun.

“Easy, easy,” Julian entreated. He put a hand to her shoulder and tried to restrain her, and then to ease her back down. She resisted. “Lieutenant Dax,” Julian said in his strong physician’s voice, “you need to rest. Your body has been through an enormous trauma.”

Ezri relented, allowing herself to be lowered back down onto the bed. “What happened?” she asked again, driven to talk about what she had been through. “I remember heading to a Jefferies tube…one of the engineers found something…”

“Later,” Julian told her. “I want you to rest right now.”

Ezri struggled up again onto her elbows. “Dr. Bashir,” she said, injecting a tone of command into her voice, “there are four billion Vahni lives at risk right now. I don’t have time to rest.”

“Look,” Julian said. “You’re not going to be able to help anybody if you attempt to do too much too soon and simply end up collapsing.” He stared directly into her eyes as he spoke, his expression hardened. She lowered herself back down onto the bed.

“I’ll lie back down,” she said, “and I’ll rest. But first you have to tell me what happened. It’s important that I know.”

At last, Julian relented. “Ensign Leishman found an amorphous gray substance in one of the Jefferies tubes—”

“Yes,” Ezri said, the recollection springing forth from somewhere in her clouded mind. “The substance. We were trying to transport it.” She remembered that Nog had been with her in the tube.

“That’s right,” Julian said. “According to Nog, it somehow moved when we attempted transport. He said he didn’t actually see it move, but that suddenly, it was elsewhere on the deck, and your hand was touching it. You collapsed immediately.”

“Julian,” she said, reaching up and grasping the sides of his shoulders. “The substance is alive.”

“All right,” he said, taking her hands in his own and lowering them back to her sides. “But you have to rest now.” He looked back over his shoulder. “Nurse Juarez,” he said, “would you prepare a hypo?”

“You have to listen to me,” she said when he peered back down at her. She saw how tired he looked, saw the tension in his features, and she understood how hard this must have been on him. “I’llrest,” she told him, “but first you have to listen to me. And tell Lieutenant Bowers.” She heard footsteps, and then saw Juarez above her as he stepped up to the bed. He held a hypospray in his hands, she saw; Julian reached across Ezri’s body, and Juarez handed it to him.

“All right,” Julian said. “Tell me.”

“The substance is alive,” she said again. “I sensed it while I seemed to be unconscious.”

“‘Seemed to be’?” Julian asked with evident skepticism.

“I didn’t fall into a coma,” she forged ahead. “Or maybe part of me did, but I was…I was…it’s an enormously powerful mind. And very alien. And I think it knows about the pulse.”

Julian looked over at Juarez. The two men seemed to share a moment of nonverbal communication, and then they looked back down at her. “All right,” Julian said. “I’ll inform Lieutenant Bowers.” He held the hypospray up in both hands and checked the setting. Ezri could see that he did not believe what she had told him. She had been in a coma, and whatever she told him she had experienced, he would ascribe to dreaming, or whatever you called the state your mind entered in such circumstances.

And maybe he’s right,she admitted to herself. But she did not think so. And despite Julian’s arrogance—born of his superior knowledge and abilities—she knew that he would pass on what she told him to Lieutenant Bowers.

Julian lowered his hands, preparing to administer the hypospray. “Wait,” Ezri said. “I have to tell you one more thing.” Julian withdrew the hypo. “The being…I think it took me to another universe.” This time, the expression on Julian’s face reflected not skepticism, but curiosity. It was almost as though she had furnished him an important piece of a puzzle.

“I’ll inform Lieutenant Bowers of everything you’ve said,” he told her. “But now it’s time for you to rest.” He reached forward again, and Ezri felt the slight pressure of the hypo against the side of her neck, its tip slightly cool.

She was very tired. She had used so much energy coming back here, she thought, and the sense of that suddenly became clear in her mind. She recalled a struggle against gray clouds, and the recollection came to her not like a memory, but like a dream of a memory, the way the lives of Dax’s past hosts often came to her.

Ezri heard the brief whisper of the hypospray close by her ear. It occurred to her that Dax had heard or felt similar sounds—quiet, short, sibilant—so often back in the Caves of Mak’ala. And thinking of the symbiont’s time in the pools back on Trill, she slid beneath the waves of sleep.

The next time Ezri opened her eyes, she woke naturally from sleep, rather than regaining consciousness. She still felt tired, but she also felt much better. Her mind had cleared, and her thoughts came easily now. She reached her arms out to each side and stretched, yawning heavily and, at the end, loudly.

“Well, hello,” she heard Julian say from across the medical bay. She lifted her head and peered across the room. Julian handed something to Nurse Richter—Juarez appeared to have left—and then started toward her. His demeanor—the sound of his voice, the expression on his face, the ease of his gait—seemed light-years away from where it had been earlier. From his manner, she supposed that her condition had improved markedly. “How are you feeling?” Julian asked as he arrived beside her bed.

“I must be feeling much better for you to be smiling like that,” Ezri joked. She offered a smile of her own, then shifted on the bed and sat up, swinging her legs over the side.

“Well, as a matter of fact, yes, you are,” he agreed. He peeked up at the diagnostic panel. “All of your vital signs have returned more or less to normal, and—” He reached up and tapped at a control, which beeped twice in response. “—your isoboramine levels have increased significantly.”

Ezri looked up at Julian, her smile vanishing instantly. “My isoboramine levels were low?” she asked. Isoboramine, she knew, was a neurotransmitter chemical essential for a joined Trill; it functioned as a medium for the transfer of synaptic processes between host and symbiont. If the amount of the chemical dropped below a certain level, the symbiont would have to be removed in order to keep it alive; in such a case, the host would die.

“Yes, they were,” Julian said apologetically. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to spring the information on you like that.”

“I know,” she said, reaching over and squeezing his hand as a sign of reassurance. “But tell me what happened.”

“Actually, I’m not entirely certain,” he said. “But I used the standard benzocyatizine treatment. It didn’t work initially, but once your vital signs stabilized, it took hold.”

“And all of this,” Ezri asked, attempting to make sense of what had happened to her, “because I touched the creature we found in the Jefferies tube?”

“Well, I’d still hesitate to say that the substance is alive,” Julian said, “but your contact with whatever it is seems to have been what injured you.”

“If it’s not alive, then what is it?” she asked. “And whether it’s alive or not, how did it do what it did to me?” She brought her hands down on the bed on either side of her body and pushed herself off, hopping onto her feet. She held on to the bed for a moment, making sure that she could stand after what she had been through, and after having been on her back for hours. Julian took hold of her upper arm, steadying her.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, lightly brushing away his hand. “I’m okay.” She walked unhurriedly across the medical bay. Ensign Richter turned from a console on the other side of the room, saw Ezri’s slow progress, and started to rise out of her chair. Ezri waved her away, and the ensign hesitated, then returned to her seat. “What is it?” Ezri asked, turning to Julian and repeating her question about the substance.

“We don’t know yet,” Julian said, following her across the room. He passed her and went to the console where Ensign Richter sat, picking up a tricorder there. “But we did learn some things about it, thanks to you.” He walked back over to her.

“Thanks to me?” she asked.

“Yes. Let me show you.” Julian motioned to a companel in one wall, and the two of them strode over to it. He opened and worked the tricorder, then keyed a sequence of touchpads on the companel. On the larger display, an image appeared of the section of the Jefferies tube in which they had found they substance. The gray pool sat draped from the location Ezri had last seen it and out across the floor of the tube. Oddly, the seemingly liquid material did not drop through the metal grating.

“This is the substance as it appears right now,” Julian said. He touched a control and a white line traced the edges of the free-form shape. “After you mentioned being in another universe, I thought about the incomplete sensor readings we’ve been getting, and it occurred to me that perhaps the substance exists in more than what we consider ‘normal’ space.” He touched another control, and a second, red line appeared, drawing an amorphous shape that abutted the first.

“This is a part of the substance in another universe?” Ezri asked, pointing at the area on the display bounded by the red.

“Not in another universe, no,” Julian said. “But in another stratum of our own. This portion of the object—” He indicated the same area Ezri had. “—exists in subspace. We’ve found other parts of the substance in other areas of space, which explains why we’ve had such trouble taking meaningful scans of it. It might also tell us similar things about the energy pulse.”

“You think they’re related?” Ezri asked.

“Well, we had the same sorts of difficulties taking sensor readings of the energy pulse and the energy in the planet’s cloud cover,” Julian said, “so it may be that the energy also extends into other domains within our universe. The engineering and sciences teams are now taking that into account as they try to find a means of stopping the next pulse.”

Ezri nodded slowly, and thought, What does this all mean?“I have another question,” she said, attempting to piece together all of the strange facts. “If my isoboramine levels were affected, then that means that the link between Ezri and Dax was compromised. Is it possible that happened because another connection was established, one between the symbiont and the substance?”

Julian wrinkled his brow. “That would presuppose that the substance is alive,” he said, “and we really have no significant evidence of that.”

“We have my experiences,” she said. “I—that is, Dax—sensed a consciousness in another universe.”

“Or maybe you or the symbiont dreamed that,” Julian suggested.

“Maybe,” Ezri said, and she had to allow for that possibility. “But I didn’t dream the reduction in my isoboramine levels. Maybe that allowed Dax to communicate with, or at least sense, this other mind.”

“It’s possible, I suppose,” Julian said. “But I’m not sure how we could ever prove that, or make use of it.”

Ezri paced away from the companel and across the room, back over to the bed in which she had awoken. Something she felt she needed to know dwelled just beyond the horizon of her memory. Maybe because it’s not your memory,she thought. She raised a fist and tapped her forehead, as though she could physically dislodge the missing recollection from its hiding place. Ezri wondered if Trill initiate training would have helped her integrate not just the memories of Dax’s former hosts, but also those exclusively of Dax—because that seemed to be what she required here: access to the recall of the symbiont. Something important had happened when she had been in that coma, something Dax knew. Since being joined, she had experienced many confusing thoughts and emotions, but she had never felt like this, isolated from what had become the other half of her mind and heart.

Ezri touched her fist to her forehead and held it there. She closed her eyes, and at once, a gray wave seemed to wash over her. The soothing waters of the Caves of Mak’ala, she thought at first, but then another interpretation came to her: the dim, energy-filled clouds surrounding the planet below, and the substance spilling across the surfaces in the Jefferies tube. And finally, she had what she was looking for.

She turned around and faced Julian across the room. “I have an idea,” she told him.