Текст книги "Sword of Damocles "

Автор книги: Geoffrey Thorne

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

  A strange shimmering halo of energy, quite visible to all of them now, coalesced around the invisible thing, giving it definition of sorts for those who couldn’t see it before. Static, loud and grating, ripped out at the team via the Ellington’s comm system, followed immediately by a voice.

   “Interlopers! You have dared to approach the[ untranslatable] Eye! You will be punished for your[ possible meaning: blasphemy] !”This was followed by more of the harsh static-the UT’s unsuccessful attempt to decipher a large portion of the alien language-and then a very ominous silence.

  “Orishans,” said Modan very softly after a moment.

  “I’m guessing,” said Vale. So much for them not having space travel. If they survived this, they wouldn’t have to worry about violating the Prime Directive. “Mr. Jaza, we’re aborting the preset flight program. We don’t want to piss anyone off more than they are.”

  “Already on it,” he said, his eyes steely as they tracked his hands dancing on the control panel.

  “Keru, try and raise these people,” said Vale, not even looking to see how quickly the big Trill had dropped into the communication station to do as ordered. “I’d like to talk to them before-”

  “Before,” said Ra-Havreii, “they blast us to cinders from their enormous spaceship.”

  “Spines of the Mother,” said Modan in a tiny voice as she absorbed the sight.

  There was a lot to take in. This time they all saw it very clearly; a massive cruiser of some sort, roughly twice Titan’s size, was in the process of shimmering into view before them. Despite its odd coloring-heavy scarlet streaks along the lower struts against a silvery material that could have passed for something woven-it was as deadly-looking as anything Vale had ever seen.

  Its appearance was very much like that of a gigantic mechanical animal of some sort-a scorpion maybe, with tails above and below-and, as they watched it bear down on the Ellington’s position, it was clear the new vessel had none of Titan’s problems maneuvering in this region. That did not bode well if they meant to get aggressive.

  “From their formerly cloakedenormous spaceship,” said the engineer. “How in the world were they able to pull that off?”

  “You can ask them about it later, Commander,” said Vale, trying along with Keru to get some weapons up or partial shields at least. It was useless, of course. They had left from Titanessentially naked and defenseless, and so they remained.

  She asked Troi if she was getting any kind of empathic hits off their new friends.

  Troi shook her head. “No, Commander. I feel something from them,” she said. “It may be anger and it may be something like curiosity, but there are other emotions there that don’t correspond to anything I know. They feel we are not only alien but in some way sullying their space.”

   “You are[ possible meaning: unclean] !”said the harsh alien voice over more static. “You will be[ possible meaning: purged] !”

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” said Keru. “And I can’t raise them.”

  “Looks like they’d rather talk than listen,” said Jaza.

  “Get us out of here, Najem,” said Vale, tense. “Easy, if you can, but back us off now.” Jaza grunted something and continued to work with the controls at a fiendish pace. She understood his difficulty. They had modified so much of the shuttle’s works to facilitate even simple motion in this area that they’d sacrificed a good portion of direct control. It had been one of the riskier aspects of this mission, but deemed acceptable when weighed against the alternative. Now the risk might kill them. The computer was not making the switch back to manual an easy thing.

  “Almost,” he said.

  “ Titancan see them,” said Troi suddenly. “I can feel the crew’s attention on this.”

  “Hell,” said Vale, picturing the Red Alert status that had to be under way on their home vessel. “ Ican feel their attention on this. Look at that monster.”

  “They’re powering some sort of weapon, Commander,” said Keru. “Readings are distorted, but-”

  “But?”

  Keru looked at her. “But this isn’t something we want to be hit by.”

  She saw it then. The alien vessel’s upper “tail” was bent close to its “head” now, and in the space between, a blue-white ball of energy was building in intensity. There was no mistaking its intent.

  “Interesting,” said Ra-Havreii as Jaza worked his console. “That appears to be a warp field. They’ve weaponized it somehow. Clever.”

  “Clever like a knife in the throat,” muttered Vale. She nudged Jaza, who nodded without looking up. Almost there. “Right. Everybody strap in. Whether they mean to or not, they’re giving us a chance to get out of here, and we’re taking it.”

  Jaza swore as the others flung themselves back into their seats. There was a staccato chorus of buckles rebuckling and what sounded like a prayer from Modan. The alien weapon glowed white and large outside their little shuttle.

  “Jaza…” said Vale.

  “Ten seconds,” he said through his teeth.

  “I don’t think we have-”

  “Got it!” he said, triumphant, and, just as the alien weapon erupted, “Firing starboard thrusters!”

  The Ellingtonlurched violently to port as the beam of coalesced warp energy ripped through its previous position.

  “Yeah, that’s not good,” said Vale. “Not nearly fast enough. We have to get moving.”

  “They’re charging the weapon again,” said Keru from his post. “Whatever you’re going to do, Mr. Jaza…”

  “Ra-Havreii!” said Jaza, his eyes fixed on the new ball of energy building on the alien vessel. “Assume I know nothing and tell me why we can’t sustain a warp bubble here. Specifically.”

  “We can, in a ship this size, in theory,” said the engineer. “But it would be unstable, porous. The safety protocols would de-initialize the drive to prevent our being shredded by the tidal-”

  “So we can use the drive,” said Jaza, already out of the cradle and heading back to the rear of the shuttle.

  “Only if you want to kill us,” said Ra-Havreii.

  “Nobody’s dying,” said Jaza, suddenly rising from his chair and heading aft.

  “Jaza!” said Vale, her own gaze zeroed on the alien weapon. “What are you doing?”

  He didn’t answer. For a moment all Vale could hear was the rush of blood in her ears. They might dodge this thing once more, maybe twice if they were lucky but maneuvering thrusters just weren’t going to cut it against plasma weapons.

  “Jaza!” she called out to him. “What the hell are you up to?”

  “Chris,” his voice rose up muffled from the aft engine compartment. “When that thing fires I want you to go to warp.”

  “But I thought we don’t want to go to warp,” said Modan. “Because of the dying.”

  “Commander Vale, I strongly recommend not listening to anything Mr. Jaza says from this point forward,” said Ra-Havreii. “An unstable warp field will create catastrophic effects for us.”

  “Find another plan, Mr. Jaza,” said Vale.

  “No time,” came the response. “We’ll make it, Chris. Trust me. Just be ready to activate the drive when I say.”

  Vale’s mind flashed to Troi, who hadn’t participated much in their discussion. Indeed, she had been silent throughout the encounter, attempting instead to reach out to Will Riker on Titanand somehow convey their situation. With the comms down she was the best link between them and home. Her telepathy might be substandard under normal conditions, but in situations like this, stress, coupled with the bridge she shared with him, could sometimes overcome that limitation.

   Will, she sent her thought to him. Will, are you there?

   Deanna?Yes. She had made contact. It was tenuous, but it was there.

  She tried to project– we’re under attack-help/escape. There was the barest hint of exchange, the thought equivalent of a garbled coded message, from which she could be sure he got nothing useful, not even the feeling of love she projected. She could feel him, of course. She could feel all of Titan’s crew. But he couldn’t feel her. Not now.

  Almost worse was the fact that, in its current state, Titanwas almost completely unable to defend itself or to run if it came to that. All they could do was watch as the Orishans, or whoever these people were, destroyed the Ellington.

  “Chris,” said Jaza’s voice. “Get ready!”

  The Orishan vessel clearly meant to fire another shot. The nimbus of destructive energy in what Vale’s mind had already begun to call its warp cannon continued to grow. It was odd. While a part of her watched the weapon power up with a certain amount of dread, another part was intrigued. The charge time between firings clearly showed that, aggressive as they were, these people had never been in anything like a real battle. On equal footing, the lag between volleys was a fatal abyss.

  Good.

   Titan, with its still-viable complement of torpedoes, might not be totally helpless against this thing that was now so obviously not a warship. The Ellington, on the other hand, was on borrowed time. Eventually the alien weapon, slow as it was, would find its target.

  “The weapon is near maximum charge, Commander,” said Keru. “They’re definitely going for another shot.”

  “Jaza!” she said, hoping the fear that had crept under her door didn’t show too much in her voice. “Tell me something!”

  “I’ve disabled the safeties, Chris,” he yelled. “When they fire the weapon, punch it.”

  “I reiterate,” said Ra-Havreii. “This is an extraordinarily bad plan. The shuttle will be torn to-”

  “I heard you the first time,” snapped Vale. The great blue-white ball of writhing energy had grown to its original proportion. “Everybody, brace.”

  “Christine,” said Troi, in a voice Vale had not heard before but recognized as possessing the same steel that had often characterized her mother. “Be sure.”

  She wasn’t, not about any of it, but it was too late. The Orishan cannon fired and time slowed to a crawl. Adrenaline surged through her body, and it seemed that she was outside herself watching as the lethal tongue of space-distorting energy roared out at them, watching as her hands danced across the manual control console, activating the drive.

  It came alive at precisely the instant the beam hit the shuttle, and whether it was the cause of the violent upheaval they suffered or the reason they survived it, she wasn’t sure. The ship was rocked horribly, lurching in a new direction with every tick of the clock. Systems all over the Ellingtonwent insane, sparking, spewing their guts into the main cabin. Alarms sounded. Some random bit of sudden debris narrowly missed Vale’s head as she was jerked out of its path by the ship’s distress. Modan screamed again but Vale forgave her. The others rode the tumult in grim silence, obviously as terrified as the young ensign and, just as obviously, having the experience or sufficient grit to keep their fear at bay.

  Then, just as suddenly as it had washed over them, the storm of violent energies was gone. Despite its pummeling, the Ellingtonhung where it had in space, listing a bit, to be certain, but still very much intact.

  Far ahead the Orishan vessel continued to loom but, for now, took no further aggressive action.

   Weren’t expecting that, were you?thought Vale. Well, take as long as you like to chew it.

  Ra-Havreii was the first to speak. “I can’t believe that worked,” he said. “We should all be dead.”

  Vale had the feeling that he was more right than anyone wanted to admit, but she wasn’t about to look too deeply into the throat of this particular equine.

  “Well done, Mr. Jaza,” said Vale. There was no response. “Jaza, report.” Still he said nothing, and she began to fear the worst. It suddenly occurred to her that there were no safety nets in the shuttle’s power room, no place to safely ride out the sort of pelting they’d just had. There was nothing down there but hard metal.

  “Modan,” said Vale, sliding instantly to damage assessment and control. They weren’t nearly out of the rough yet, and she would need him. “Get aft and see what’s happened to Mr. Jaza.”

  “Aye, sir,” said Modan after the briefest hesitation. She was unbuckled and sliding down the ladder in an instant. Good. She might not be dead weight after all. Keru was already back at his station, running diagnostics to see what, if anything, they still had to work with. The report was not the best. Emergency systems were all that was keeping them from the vacuum, and several of them had dipped to critical in the time it took him to check their status. At best they had been given a small reprieve. Still, the failure of their weapon seemed to have given the Orishans pause.

   Let’s see if we can extend that feeling, she thought, staring at the ominous, vaguely insectile ship.

  “Counselor?” said Vale, not taking her eye off the alien vessel. “Anything from the Orishans?” Troi shook her head. “Dr. Ra-Havreii, can you tell me anything? Why are we still here?”

  The Efrosian seemed frozen in contemplation, his deep-set eyes far away, staring past Troi and Keru and Vale to the space that was visible through the forward viewport.

  “Two warp fields,” he said at last. “I should have thought of it. The dissonance between the weapon’s warp frequency and that of this ship acted as a shield.”

  “I thought it might work,” said Jaza, returning to the cockpit with Modan following close behind. He looked a little the worse for wear-there was a field patch over his left temple where Modan had bandaged what was obviously a wicked gash-but otherwise he was all right.

  “You thoughtit would work?” said Vale in mock irritation.

  “Yes,” said Jaza, wincing as Modan helped him into the pilot’s cradle.

  “If we survive this, Commander,” said Vale. “You’re going on report.”

  “Of course,” said Jaza with a smile.

  “Commander,” said Keru in a tone Vale was sure she didn’t like. “Probe telemetry indicates a massive energy flux in the area of Mr. Jaza’s ghost field.”

  “Let me see that,” said Ra-Havreii, nearly pouncing on the sensor controls. Jaza too made an effort to shift position for a look at the incoming data, but some hidden injury only allowed him to wince.

  “This is bad,” said Ra-Havreii. “There is something inside the field, Commander. Something with mass and gravity. The readings are garbled. It’s as if there’s something there and yet-”

  Again their conversation was shattered by the sound of alien static and that same grating, stilted speech of the Orishan representative.

   “You have been[ possible meaning: judged] ,”the creature said. “Now you will face the[ possible meaning: wrath] of Erykon’s Eye.”

  “Now what?” said Modan.

  As if in response, the Orishan vessel broke off, shimmering back to invisibility even as it receded into the distance. Just as it vanished completely, “Uh-oh,” said Keru. Before anyone could ask what he meant, the Ellingtonwas rocked by a massive shockwave. Everything and everyone that wasn’t strapped down was flung against the port bulkhead.

  Only Counselor Troi, still seated, still trying desperately to make contact with Titan, remained more or less undisturbed.

  “Everyone strap in!” bellowed Vale, as if there was any need for the order. The others were already scrambling to the jump seats. “What the hell was-”

  Again the ship was battered by a massive jolt, even more violent than the first. This time everything was rocked forward, as if a giant fist had taken hold of the ship and was dragging it into a new position.

   Will!Troi sent with as much force as she could put behind the thoughts. Something’s happening here. We’re in trouble! Real troubl-

  Outside the forward viewport, Jaza’s so-called ghost field was a ghost no longer. A massive spiraling, undulating chaos of light and motion the size of a planet was suddenly writhing there in the space ahead and, despite their efforts to break away, was pulling them inexorably in.

  Worse, if worse was possible, the shimmering globe began to spit energy, great arching tongues of something unknown and deadly, kilometers wide and thousands long, in random directions. The Ellingtonwas being pulled into that maelstrom, and there was nothing they could do about it.

  Vale bellowed commands, and Keru and Jaza moved to obey-any evasive measure, any shielding trick, anything to keep them from being drawn in. Nothing worked. Soon all they could see outside was the sea of boiling energies sucking them down.

  “Set for collision!” yelled Vale over the noise of sparking machinery and computer warnings about energetic discharges.

  Just as they were sucked down, the entire mass erupted at once, spewing its energies wide in a tsunami of force that had to be witnessed to be believed.

  Waves of the weird multicolored energy leaped out in every direction, consuming or obscuring every scrap of normal space that had previously been visible.

  Troi’s mind screamed out to her husband. Will! Get out of there! Get away! Now!She could feel him there, feel his distress as if it were her own as the great wave of energy swept toward Titanlike an ocean of fire. They couldn’t move. There was nowhere to run and no way to do it if there were. “Will! Imzadi!”

  But it was useless. She could feel him, barely, but he couldn’t feel her, neither her panic nor her love, except as ephemeral echoes of what they should be.

  Then even that spindly connection was suddenly gone, ripped away along with the sight of the stars and blackness of normal space. The wave of wild energy ripped outward, swallowing the tiny shuttle utterly, obliterating its connection with the space around it. She was alone for the first time in years, perhaps ever, absolutely alone.

  “No!” she screamed.

  “Deanna!” yelled Vale, fighting alongside Jaza to get some sort of manual control of the shuttle’s motion. It was useless. “Are you hurt?!”

  “It’s Titan,” said Troi. “It’s gone!”

  “Gone?” said Modan, nakedly terrified. “What does she mean, it’s gone?”

  “I can’t feel them anymore!” said Troi in obvious distress. “I can’t feel any of them!”

  Whatever empathic contact she had with her husband, whatever ebb and flow had normally passed between her and the three-hundred-plus members of Titan’s crew was gone, severed as soon as they were caught in the field eruption. Vale had no idea what such a severing might mean, but she was sure it couldn’t be good.

   “Planetary impact imminent,”said the computer over the din. “Implementing automatic safety protocols.”

   Planetary impact?thought Vale. What the hell? Orisha is hundreds of thousands of kilometers from here.

  “There’s something in the field, Chris,” said Jaza as if reading her mind. “I don’t know how it’s possible, but it’s solid and it’s coming up fast.”

  Those that could watched in astonished horror as the effects of the energy wave gave way to the simple clouds of the upper atmosphere of some unknown world. There were landmasses down there, a vast sparkling ocean of something both white and blue, and the sort of vegetation one generally only saw in nightmares. This world was like an enormous jungle, stretching from horizon to horizon in all directions. Mountainous leafy plants of impossible proportions, huge towering spires of turquoise or red that stood in clusters surrounded by hills and other plants that they dwarfed the way Izarian cityscapes dominated her homeworld.

  This was a wild planet, terra incognita, completely untouched by anything recognizable as civilization, and they were about to crash into its heart. The pressure of reentry, without the normal shielding to protect them, pressed relentlessly against them all. Vale knew she was a moment from a blackout.

  She saw something then on her periphery that drew her eye. A great black mass had appeared in the swirling chaos of energies around the planet, with a shape that was chillingly familiar.

  She watched in horror as the shape, very obviously that of Titannow, was buffeted and ultimately torn to bits by the rampaging waves of energy. It went screaming down toward the surface in great burning chunks.

   “Impact imminent,”said the computer as her mind rebelled against the sight her eyes forced it to process. “Implementing emergency protocol priority alpha.”

  The transporter nimbus enveloped the members of her team, spiriting them to the ground where, in theory, they would have a better chance of survival than with the shuttle’s impact.

  Vale had no time to grieve for her friends or to ponder whether their chances would be better naked on this unknown and likely hostile planet, but as the transporter beam took her and she slipped into unconsciousness, her last thought was, “At least I don’t have to hear Ra-Havreii’s damned humming anymore.”

Chapter Five

  T he memories of the previous days came back to him in a rush, and with them the sort of shattering despair that only a supreme act of will could force to recede.

   Titan. Dead with all hands. The whole crew. The rest of the away team scattered, maybe dead as well, and him and Modan trapped in the middle of some massive local conflict.

  Jaza had seen bad days in his time, horrendous ones, in fact, but nothing to compare with this. He had lost friends before, fighting the Cardassians, during his previous Starfleet assignment as science officer on the U.S.S. al-Arif, even a few on Titan, but he had never lost so many so quickly.

  Modan had dragged him away from the scene of her killing of the alien soldier, concealing him under a canopy of the massive leaves that made up so much of the local flora. She was off somewhere, making sure the soldier’s body would not be discovered by its fellows.

  The change in her was remarkable and went far beyond the cosmetic. In shifting into what he could only guess was some sort of naturally evolved hunting or fighting mode, her body now sported, in addition to the new dermal plating, an assortment of spines running the length of her back from the base of her skull to the bottom of her spine. Her “quills” she called them.

  She had adopted an almost hunched posture that forced her face forward and down in the way he had noticed in many lower forms of predator on several worlds. She still looked like a golden sculpture, but now, instead of some sort of idealized version of a humanoid female, Modan looked like something out of one of the fables he used to read his children when he wanted to give them a healthy scare.

  He couldn’t let himself think of them now.

  It was one thing to take these long missions of exploration away from home and family and something else to think that he might never see them again. No.

  He froze the images his mind had tried to form and forced them back into the dark recesses. Plenty of time for that sort of grief later.

   “There’s something wrong with the sky,”he thought, looking up at it. It wasn’t the color-a kind of copper and gold-or the complete absence of clouds or that the shape of the sun was somehow refracted into an oval by this planet’s atmosphere. There was just something wrongwith it as far as he was concerned, and something familiar too, though he couldn’t exactly say what that something was.

  “Can you move?” asked Modan, suddenly beside him. It was odd hearing her mellifluous voice coming from that spiny animalistic face, but it helped reassure him that, despite appearances, she was still herself. “The battle is moving this way.”

  He still hurt all over, especially where his ribs were obviously broken, but he knew from experience what skirting the edge of a pitched firefight could do. He could move and told her so.

  As she helped him to his feet, he realized the sounds of battle-familiar shouts, explosions, and weapons fire-had shifted toward what he had arbitrarily named east.

  “Where are we going?” he said. He had no clear idea how long he’d been in his delirium, but from the thin appearance of new hair on his jaws and chin, he presumed at least a day had passed since the computer had beamed them here.

  “The shuttle,” she said.

  “It’s intact?”

  She nodded, one of her head quills stabbing lightly into his cheek. “Mostly. I fixed what I could. You can do the rest.”

  “Why didn’t we go there straightaway?” he said, marveling at her confidence in his abilities. He wasn’t an engineer, after all.

  “The way was blocked by the Orishan fighters,” she said, helping him navigate what looked like a small forest of enormous lavender palm fronds that grew straight up from the soil. “They’re all over this area, Najem.”

  “Orishans?” he said, surprised. “What makes you think these are Orishans?” The last he knew, they were crashing down on someplace entirely new that was a good half million kilometers from Orisha.

  “Didn’t you ever look at the visual signals we harvested?” she said, slashing at the snakelike vines with the serrated edge of her forearm. Jaza realized he hadn’t. He had been so busy getting the shuttle ready for the trip, he hadn’t actually gone back to look at the visuals that Modan and the rest had sifted out of the signal chaff. “Well, these are them. I don’t know where this war came from. This is supposed to be a rigidly stable society. They don’t even have nation states.”

  As if to punctuate their confused state, a series of large explosions sounded somewhere behind them, close enough to shake the ground and the nearby foliage. They might not have nations, thought Jaza. But they’ve certainly got the conflict part down.

  For a moment he was again transported back to those awful bloody days on Bajor when he spent every waking moment figuring and implementing ways to kill as many Cardassians as he could as efficiently as possible. Those days were long gone, thank the Prophets, but the memories were sometimes as fresh and immediate as the thought of his mother’s smile.

  “Maybe this is a colony,” he said, stumbling over a small but hidden cluster of stones. “We thought they didn’t have space travel and we were wrong. What else could we have missed?”

  “It seems as though we missed a lot,” said Modan, helping him stay upright. “But these are definitely Orishans. How they got here, wherever we are, I can’t say.”

  “A broken colony of some kind,” he mused aloud. “That would explain some of this. The Federation has had a few of them. They’re often conflict engines.”

  She stopped abruptly, motioning for him to be quiet and still. He nodded, resting his weight against the base of a massive vine that was as thick as one of the smaller sequoias he’d seen on his first visit to Earth four years ago, shortly after he’d transitioned from the Bajoran Militia to Starfleet. Huge as the vines were, they were all still relatively close to the ground, never rising higher than ten or fifteen meters. One day he envisioned there would be towering versions of these things, stretching high into the sky.

  Modan disappeared briefly into the brush, only to return looking as agitated as her golden armored skin would allow.

  She motioned for him to stay absolutely mum and still, as if he had enough energy to do more than nod. As they huddled there in the crook of the great vine, something moved past them in the jungle beyond.

  Though he couldn’t see it directly for all the leaves and vines, he did catch a glimpse of what looked like one massive segmented eye and maybe a set of feathery scales running along the creature’s side. It was enormous, whatever it was, and he was happy Modan had chosen to give it a wide berth. The jungle seemed to hold its breath as the thing went by; the sound of insects and the larger creatures that fed on them died to a whisper until the monster had passed.

  After what felt like a collective exhalation, Modan said very softly, “It’s a predator. I saw it kill one of the big avians yesterday. I’m sorry, but we will have to go the long way around.”

  “It’s okay, Modan,” said Jaza. “I can make it.”

  She looked at him then; her large blue-green eyes seemed filled with sadness and, despite her changed appearance, served, as did her voice, to remind him that she was still the same young woman he’d been flirting with for the last few days on Titan.

  “No,” she said sadly. “It’s not okay and I am sorry for what you’ll have to see. Come.”

  So he followed her lead as they trudged in silence through the lush and occasionally hostile alien jungle. He asked her at one interval about her fierce metamorphosis, and she said that once the Seleneans had all looked as she did now but that, since joining the Federation, they had taken to breeding crиche siblings to mirror as best they could the dominant races of the UFP. Rather than an effort to blend in with those societies-the golden metallic skin prevented this in any case-it was an attempt on behalf of the Pod Mothers to put their new neighbors at ease.

  However, the Mothers did not want their children to be defenseless in the wider galaxy and so allowed the primary DNA, that which accounted for this more durable and lethal form, to remain. In cases of imminent physical attack, a Selenean would revert to her feral aspect until the danger had passed.

  “It’s not as if we keep our nature secret, Najem,” she said as they fought their way through yet another hyper-dense thicket of ten-meter leaves and six-meter blades of ochre grass. “All this is in the Starfleet medical database.”

  “Good thing your minds don’t go feral along with your bodies,” he remarked, thinking how dire his current situation might be had that been the case. “I wouldn’t want to have to fight you like this.”

  “The Mothers are wise,” said Modan in the sort of reverent tone that Jaza had only heard in the voices of Bajoran vedeks when talking of the Prophets. “And, no, you wouldn’t want to fight me.”

  “Which is your natural form?” he asked her, wondering if he could manage to shove this vision far enough away to remain attracted to her. The banter was only a cover in any case, something to keep his mind off the fates of his friends both on the away team and Titan. Plenty of time for the worst news later.

  “Both forms are mine,” she said. “I am as I am.”

  She had pulled farther ahead of him while ascending another of the steep little hills and now disappeared completely behind a particularly thick clump of the giant fronds dominating the summit.