Текст книги "Sword of Damocles "

Автор книги: Geoffrey Thorne

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  “Modan, wait,” he said, wincing at the strain on his battered skeleton. “Let me catch up.”

  She said something that was eaten by the noise of animals chattering in the brush all around. The smell was different here somehow; the normal all-pervasive musk of decaying organic matter and flowers in heat had given way to something unpleasantly acrid and metallic.

  Smoke.

  Something had burned here recently and might still be burning. With all the explosions from the incendiaries being employed by the Orishans in their battle, it stood to reason that there would be many burnt or burning areas to navigate.

  This sort of destruction was also, unhappily, familiar to him. As he climbed the last few meters, the smell of soot and metal triggered yet another memory from his days fighting on Bajor.

  He was running through the streets of Ilvia, desperately pushing his way between bodies in the flood of his people going in the opposite direction. The bomb he’d set had gone off hours too early. A problem with the timer? A faulty circuit? He never found out but, just at that moment, didn’t much care. The cause wasn’t a priority.

  His father was in there, tending to patients in a makeshift clinic only a hundred meters from the ordnance storage facility that had been his target.

  He had hinted, obliquely of course, that it might be best, for that day at least, not to see patients or to see them elsewhere, but his father either didn’t or wouldn’t understand the soft warning.

  “Someone in this family has to do the Prophets’ will, Najem,” Jaza Chakrys had told him.

  It was a familiar refrain and produced a familiar effect. The two of them had spent the next few minutes screaming at each other. What have the Prophets ever done for us, Father? If you have to ask, then you’ve strayed too far from your path, Najem. I don’t stray from my path, Father, I reject it-But by then his father had had enough and had left him there alone, seething in the dusty street.

  Had the bomb gone off as programmed, his father and the patients would all have been long gone, back to their homes and hovels, far away from the town center. But it hadn’t and they hadn’t and he had to find his father.

  “Jaza Chakrys,” he called out to anyone in the stampede of people. “Has anyone seen Jaza Chakrys?”

  It was no use. The plume of ugly smoke spewing up behind them from the ordnance depot coupled with the noise of the Cardassian civil alert system– Culprits and their families will be found and punished!-had transformed these people into a herd of fleeing beasts.

  He’d fought his way through them, almost literally in a few instances, until he managed to break through only a few meters from the empty shrine that his father used as his hospital.

  He remembered being thrilled that the temple’s front faзade, a long stone wall with a large stone ring with a sculpture of an Orb at the crown, was only scorched a bit, its windows only shattered by the force of the nearby explosion.

  He’d burst in, kicking the remains of the destroyed front door away and screaming for his father to show himself if he was present. Jaza Chakrys was not there. No one was. Aside from Najem, the shrine was empty. Under its new covering of shattered wood and glass there was hardly a sign that anyone had been there at all. He had allowed himself to think that maybe his father had actually listened to him for once.

  It was then that he had heard that strange sound, like wind chimes in chorus, and his head had begun to ache.

  “Najem,” said Modan, gently shifting him from the place where he’d fallen unconscious. “Are you all right? Can you continue?”

  “Fine for now,” he said. “Sorry about that.”

  “No,” she said softly, an incongruous gentleness from something that looked so fierce. “I’m sorry. For you.”

  She helped him rise again and this time let him lean on her as they made their way back to the top of the hill. She shoved the leaves away or cut them with her talons as they pushed through and then, as they emerged in the open again, he saw the reason for her sadness.

  “Caves of fire,” he said, incredulous.

  There before them, lying in a billion smoldering pieces at the end of the deep gash its impact had cut in the terrain, was a starship. Or what was left of one anyway.

  Though nearly none of the bits were intact enough to identify, the ones that were told the story. There was one of the nacelles, sticking up out of the dirt, still glowing faintly. There was the long sloping arc of a saucer disk, oddly pristine among the charred and burning wreck, the remains of the saucer section. The wreckage was spread over kilometers, the groove it had dug even longer.

  There were bodies in there as well. Hundreds of broken sentients peppered the destroyed machine’s carcass, each bent or shredded or contorted horribly and all of them burnt to charcoal by what had obviously been a hideous explosion. It wasn’t hard to ferret the source of the conflagration. The ship’s warp core, still dangerously intact despite its scorched and battered state, continued to belch plasma and to radiate so much energy that he could feel the warmth from where he stood tens of meters away.

  “That’s not good,” he said after a time.

  “No,” she said. “I’m worried about it too. If it blows…”

  He nodded. These words, the simple clinical assessment, were the best he had right now.

   Titan. This was Titan.

  He had lost friends before, fighting the Cardassians, on away missions for Starfleet, even a few since joining this most recent crew. But he had never lost so many so quickly and never ever in this horrible way.

  Bralik. Ree. Melora. Dakal. All of them. Dead. Dead. Dead. And, of course, he had survived it. His blessing from the Prophets had protected him again, though, just now, it felt a little bit more like a curse.

  He fell silent again as the enormity of it all went through him.

  Modan let him stare at the scene for another full minute before urging him on.

  They came upon the shuttle as the sun dipped low behind them and, had he not known exactly what to look for, he would have missed it, which was the point.

  The providence that had protected him and Modan thus far had also left the Ellington’s stealth field projector mercifully intact. It too had smacked into the surface of this unknown world but had found a better resting place than Titan.

  The slight ripple in the air, like a breeze drifting along an invisible curtain between what looked like a closely clustered stand of the viney trees and a massive crystal formation, was the only sign that the shuttle was present at all.

  It wasn’t a cloak really, as it only bent visible light around the ship and couldn’t block even cursory sensor scans, but for missions like this one was meant to be, where secret observation of the new culture was part of the brief, the stealth field was ideal.

  As long as it lasted, they would be safe from premature discovery here.

  “Come on,” she said, helping him over the natural ditch that ran between them and it.

  Modan had done a good job getting the primary systems back online, though her success was due less to her engineering skills than to the fact that the bulk of the damage was cosmetic. The shuttle’s guts had exploded all over the interior, making it look well past ready for the scrap heap, but very little of it had sustained any truly catastrophic damage.

  The systems that had been most compromised were those that had shorted during the first hit from the Orishan warp cannon.

  By simply swapping a few isolinear chips from less important components to those they needed, and reattaching or sealing a few wires here and there, he was able to get the Ellingtonback up to nearly eighty percent of full functionality. The remaining problem, now that the ship was actually running, was to get it flying again.

  Not being an engineer, it would take him hours, perhaps days, to figure out precisely what was wrong with the propulsion system and then determine if that thing could be fixed.

  As she lowered him into the rehabilitation bed and he felt the beams of healing energy course through his body, he told her how to use the computer to fix their location so that they would have some idea at least of where they were.

  “I will, Najem,” she said as the sedation beams sent him into the dark. “And maybe I can find a spare uniform now that some of this junk as been cleared away.”

  “Uniform,” he asked as he drifted off. “What…?”

  “Mine got shredded when I transformed,” she said, moving out of his field of vision. He could hear her rummaging. “Why did you think I didn’t shift back? I’m naked.”

  His dreams were dark flitty things, full of ugly portents, which he was pleased not to retain once he came back to himself. The pain in his abdomen was little more than an ache by then. His skull no longer throbbed, and she had cleaned the blood off his face. He felt like himself.

  “Modan?”

  “Here, Najem,” she said, and she was. Clad in the white and gray undermesh of an EVA suit, she looked like the old Y’lira Modan, and he was glad. “You look much better now.”

  “I feel better,” he said and even his voice had more strength in it than before.

  He tried to sit up, but the rush of blood to his brain made him dizzy.

  “Wait,” she said soothingly. “Try again in a moment.”

  “That’s a good plan, I think,” he said and relaxed again. He might be healed, but it was wise to let his body realize it before he forced it to do too much.

  He tried again more slowly, and was rewarded with a smile from his golden companion. It was hard to picture her the other way now, and he was glad of that as well.

  “All right,” he said, swiveling his legs off the recovery table and facing her. “Did you fix our location?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I must have done something wrong.”

  He got up under his own steam this time and made his way to the science station, still lit up from Modan’s recent use. She hadn’t made any mistakes. The sensors were online and had fixed points for the local sun, using it as a central reference from which to generate star maps and, from them, generate a location mark relative to the Federation. Travel through the strange vortex could have deposited them anywhere.

  “What in the-?” he said, checking and rechecking the sensor data.

  “Yes,” she said. “According to this, the stars are in the wrong places. It must be a malfunction, yes?”

  “No,” he said as the realization of what had happened washed over him. “No, it’s not a malfunction.”

  “But this says we are on Orisha, Najem,” she said. “This can’t be Orisha. There are no cities, no high-level technology. These warriors are killing each other with crude projectile weapons and fuel bombs.”

  “It’s not a malfunction, Modan.”

  “And the stars?” Her confusion was quickly devolving into the fear she’d displayed during their bumpy flight. How odd to see her so fierce in combat and yet cowed by these more abstract concepts. “It has all the stars in the wrong positions. Fractionally so, but still.”

  “They’re not in the wrong positions,” he said. “I think-I think weare.”

  His fingers tapped in a few frantic commands and requests, asking the computer to verify his deepening apprehension.

   “Verification,”said the computer. “Analysis is confirmed.”

  He sat there for a moment, letting the words sink in. He hadn’t really needed the computer to verify the charts and extrapolations. Just looking at the data had told him all he needed to know.

  He sat there, feeling his limbs, still weak despite their healing, sensing Modan’s increasing agitation. He wondered if her Pod Mothers had designed her this way or if it was something unaccounted for. Then a thought came to him that made him smile first and then laugh.

  “Najem,” she said, visibly shaken by his outburst. “Are you well?”

  “Fine, Modan,” he said when the last fit was done. “I’m just laughing at the joke the Prophets have played on me. On us, I suppose.”

  “The Prophets?” she said. “The beings your people revere as gods? What have they to do with this?”

  “They made me a promise a long time ago,” he said, swiveling to face her. “And this is how they keep it.”

  “Najem, I don’t understand you.”

  “This is Orisha, Modan,” he said. “This is the planet Orisha. That energy mass we discovered was obviously some kind of temporal aperture.”

  “We have traveled through time?” she said slowly, feeling the weight of it and its truth as well.

  “Looks that way, yes.”

  “No,” she said, aghast. “Oh, no.”

  “Yes,” he said. “We should have died. We should have smacked into this place and burned like Titan, like our friends, but because of the promise the Prophets made to me, we’re here, alive, a thousand years in the past.”

  “And this makes you laugh?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Because, no matter what else happens, we absolutely have to get off this planet, as soon as we can, and we have absolutely no way to do it.”

  Her golden head tilted slightly to one side as she tried to determine if he was not still a little delirious from his injuries.

Chapter Six

ORISHA, STARDATE 58449.1

  I t took Vale almost twenty minutes to disentangle herself from the vines, much of which time was also spent making sure she didn’t free herself too soon. Sudden release would have sent her plummeting twenty meters to the jungle floor.

  Seen from above, the place had looked lush, bubbling with ambient moisture that rose off the violet flora in thick rolling clouds, but also somewhat peaceful. Now, in the thick of it, her body nearly immobilized by the spiderweb of sticky grasping vines, she was forced to revise that opinion. Everything moved here. Everything was not only alive but actively so. The vines, some as thick as a human arm, twined themselves in their multitudes around larger growths that, to her surprise, were themselves nothing more than enormous stalks. The thinner tangles that held her seemed to resist her exertions to get free, inspiring a few moments of panic. But with effort and patience, she managed to loose herself from their grip.

  Pulling herself onto the lip of one of the thicker vines, she took a look around. The jungle stretched in all directions without a sign of a break anywhere. She could see stalks in the distance that rose up to a canopy higher than the tallest buildings on Izar.

  There were scores of insects, birds, reptiles, and at least one creature that looked like a hodgepodge of several mammals crossed with a cactus. It stopped a few meters away to stare at her out of bulbous milky-white eyes.

  “Vale to Troi,” she said, tapping her combadge. No answer. She tried again with Keru and then with the rest of the team with the same result. Either her badge was damaged or something was interfering with the signal.

  Or she was alone.

  She knew the longer she stayed at this height, the worse her chances for avoiding a deadly fall. But going down also meant losing any hope of keeping her bearings; little daylight penetrated to the ground, and she knew, without instrumentation of some kind, that it would be brutally hard to navigate a way out of this on foot, much less to find the others. They should have all materialized in the same vicinity. Emergency transports were meant to put the entire team and their supplies on the surface of a target world without damage. Clearly something had gone wrong.

   “I can’t feel them! I can’t feel any of them!”The memory of the panic in Troi’s voice went through her again like an icy knife. She shoved the feeling away and considered her prospects.

  The drop to the jungle floor was not sheer. In fact, were she simply to let herself fall, she could be assured of having every bone in her body shattered and her flesh torn by the innumerable serrated brambles, vines and leaves she would hit as she fell.

  The way across the top of the canopy was far more treacherous. She might make a go of leaping and swinging from stalk to stalk, but eventually a vine would snap in her hands or her feet would slip on a mossy bough and down she would fall.

  Every scenario eventually put her on the ground, and in mostly unpleasant ways. So, after deciding which way was east and fixing it in her mind, down she went. Better to get there on her own terms.

  It was dark on the forest floor, the entire area suffused with that same gloomy twilight that seemed to permeate places like Ferenginar and Berengaria VII. It was cooler on the bottom as well. She lost her jacket fending off the attack of some large multilegged lizard and now felt its absence acutely.

  Mites and other unknown creatures flitted and skittered in the hidden reaches, and there was a sort of deep moaning sound-animal or artificial, she didn’t know-that rumbled through the area periodically. For all of that, Vale was alone.

   East, she reminded herself. There was no reason to go that way specifically. She just felt better walking-all right, trudging-through lichen and forest muck toward the light, even if the source was hidden behind the seemingly endless stretch of purple jungle.

  It didn’t make sense. Once her body got used to navigating the wild but fairly predictable contours of the jungle floor, her mind was free to drift without impeding her progress.

  Somehow, she knew, this was Orisha. There had been a range of mountains in one of the visual signals they’d managed to decipher that was identical to the one she’d seen from the canopy.

  The strange energy mass hadn’t contained a new world but had served as some kind of shunt, bridging the hundreds of millions of kilometers to the planet in an instant. But what explained such a phenomenon? Was it natural or artificial? How had it formed?

  In a way that was good news. They had made it to shore more quickly than they had anticipated, but what they found there did not match the data they’d collected.

  Orisha was, at least in part, an industrial society. She had watched the snippets of visual data Troi and Modan had culled from the bizarrely warped signal bleeds. Granted there was no real pattern to any of it; they had been watching three to five seconds snipped from moments isolated from what could have been hundreds of years of signal bleed. It was a sure bet that they’d missed a lot; certainly they had missed all the subtleties that must be present in a society this large.

  There were still things they had thought they knew for certain, and yet, now that she was here, none of them had been borne out.

  Where were the cities? She had seen something that resembled one in one of the snippets. It had been a gathering, Troi supposed a religious gathering, of a few thousand Orishans in some sort of open arena, with a night sky and something like skyscrapers clearly visible in the background. Granted the Orishan architecture-a strange admixture of familiar constructions, the same woven metal she’d seen on the watchdog vessel, and massive blue crystals carved into useful shapes-was foreign to her, but some commonalities always arose no matter how alien the species.

  So, where were the cities? Where were the roads connecting the cities? Where were the signs that the Orishans had mined, farmed, or otherwise domesticated the natural resources of their world?

  Nowhere, apparently. This was as close to a pristine ecosystem as she had ever seen, and that couldn’t be if the Orishans had developed any version of high technology.

  Invisible cities. Warp energy for something other than space travel. Space travel for something other than expansion or exploration. Weapons powerful enough to wreak havoc on alien vessels, but which had clearly been designed without an inkling that the enemy might wish to protect itself or fire back.

  It was a puzzle all right, something Vale didn’t like normally. She was a fan of solutions, but in this context the puzzle kept her mind off the eventual concerns of her belly and the very strange thing she’d seen just before she’d blacked out.

   “I can’t feel any of them!”Troi had said, meaning the emotions of Titan’s crew. They all just vanished from her perceptions, switched off like three hundred fifty lights. There was only one thing that could have caused that, as far as Vale was concerned. One thing and one thing only. In view of the large black shape she’d seen being torn to bits in the energy storm, she had a very solid suspicion that her feeling was correct.

  Something was tracking her.

  She’d been trudging for about four hours by her reckoning without sight or word of the others when she noticed her shadow.

  There wasn’t anything she could put her fingers on exactly, beyond the gradual absence of animal noise in the surrounding jungle, but years as a peace officer had taught her to trust her instincts when her hackles rose even the slightest bit. Right now they were at full attention.

  Something was watching her and moving with her, a few meters beyond the densely clustered vines and leaves. Of course there would be predators in a place like this. Of course some of them would be big enough to give her trouble, especially considering the new scents her simian-descended body had introduced to this place and the amount of noise she made as she went. She could only hope she was too alien to be recognized as prey.

   Heartbeat slow, she told herself, remembering her survival training. Pace regular, body relaxed and calm.

  In a normal jungle, even one that was exceedingly lush, there would be bamboo shoots or tree branches or even stones she might use as weapons, but this was Orisha. The vines and leaves were either too spindly or too thick or too supple to allow her to make anything more dangerous than a length of rope, and the crystal formations, while certainly durable enough to cause damage, were also too solid to break or even damage with her bare hands.

  She was just thinking about maybe trying for some higher ground at least when the thing attacked. It was so fast she barely had time to react. It whipped out at her from her left side, barely disturbing the flora. In the glimpse she caught of it as she spun out of its path she saw something long and thick like a constricting snake but with thousands of tiny legs running in two rows along its belly.

  She hit the ground hard as it passed and looked up to find it had disappeared into the thick foliage the way a shark disappears into an ocean.

  There was a tear in her undershirt but not in her flesh, thankfully.

  The thing ripped out at her again, just as she was getting to her feet, this time giving her no time to dodge.

  She managed to get her hands up as it smacked into her, catching its head between them even as it bore her to the ground.

  It was a monster, all right, its skin a shifty scaly texture that modulated its color to match the plants around it.

  Its face, if you could call it a face, was a nightmare, little more than a gaping hole filled with multiple rows of tiny fishhook teeth. Its breath stank like a hundred corpses left too long under a hot sun, sweet and musky and full of blood.

  As it lunged at her, its throat let out an ugly gurgling sound as if it, rather than she, were being constricted to death.

  She could feel its million legs clawing at her as its serpentine body tried to wrap itself around hers.

  “No!” she said through her teeth, forcing the hideous maw away from her face. “I’m…not…your…dinner!”

  Of course it ignored her. If there was a brain in there at all, it was just complex enough to tell the thing to eat and eat often.

  She tried to shift her weight, to get some leverage against it, but its lower coils already held her legs fast. The tiny legs had encircled her torso by then and were in the process of squeezing off her air. She had minutes, maybe seconds, to think of something, but with that slaughterhouse of a mouth bearing down on her, she had no attention to spare.

  Her lungs burned as they struggled against the increasing pressure. Her heart raced. This thing was going to kill her, right here in the sopping decay of the alien jungle, and then it would eat her or drink her blood or whatever it did to survive.

  The giant maw forced her hands back and back again until it was in kissing distance of her face. She felt the crushing tightness around her stomach and chest forcing her breath out in short ragged gasps.

  She told herself to fight, but her arms were numb and there was music and her mother scolding her about something and why did her head hurt so much?

  Then there was a sound she recognized, a humming noise that brought with it a flash of incandescent light. Suddenly the monster was gone.

  Standing nearby, with a phaser in his hand, was a big man in a mud-spattered Starfleet uniform. His thick mustache did nothing to hide the look of profound relief on his face.

  “Keru!” she rasped at him as she struggled to stand again. “Took you long enough.”

  “Sorry, Commander,” he said, moving to help her. “I’ll try to be quicker next time.”

  Keru’s report was better than expected, considering. He and the others, Troi and Ra-Havreii, had materialized close to each other along with many of the survival supplies they would need.

  While Troi and Ra-Havreii tried to get their malfunctioning equipment working, Keru had concerned himself with searching the jungle for Vale, Jaza, and Modan. There was no sign of the latter two as yet.

  “Something’s interfering with the combadges,” said Keru as he let Vale walk on her own the final few meters to their camp. “Dr. Ra-Havreii is working on the problem. I located as much of our gear as I could. Some of it is still missing. I was actually looking for it when I found you.”

  “Lucky me,” she said.

  “Me too,” he said, managing a grin.

  Vale was glad of Keru in that moment. He was a rock, as unshakable as they came, and without his support, she wasn’t sure she would be able to continue, in light of their larger dilemma.

  “We can’t be sure what happened, Christine,” said Troi once Vale had gotten some field rations in her and injected herself with a broad-spectrum inoculant.

  The counselor looked surprisingly unfazed by the current circumstances, which somehow irritated Vale. She was alert, relatively free of mud and other detritus and working, as best she could, to assist the engineer with his repair of the communications pack.

  Ra-Havreii, by contrast, seemed little more than a robot, working away in silence on whatever task was set him and looking none of his companions in the face or speaking. His body was there, but as was increasingly the case with him, the Efrosian’s mind was far, far away. This time Vale didn’t begrudge him that. She wished she could escape too.

  “I’m sure, Deanna,” she said. “I know what I saw.”

  “And I know what I felt,” said the other woman. “But the Enterprise-”

  “We’re not on the Enterpriseanymore, Counselor,” said Vale, suddenly angry and wanting to hit something, many times, as hard as she could. “ Ourship is dead. Everyone on it is dead. I saw it happen. I don’t know how it got so close so fast, but I know what I saw. So, please, shut up about the Enterpriseand let me try to figure out how we’re getting out of this mess.”

  “I know what you’re feeling, Chris,” said Deanna evenly. “I feel some of it too. But my own experience tells me to wait until we have real solid proof of whatever happened to Titan. You may not like to hear it now, but Will and I have been in this place before and survived. I’m not declaring him dead or any of them dead, until I see it.”

  “You’re in denial,” said Vale.

  “You’re not qualified to make that assessment, Commander,” said Troi. Then she went back to work with Ra-Havreii without another word.

  They had limited resources and fewer options, so Vale’s eventual plan was about as basic as they came: Find the shuttle. Find Jaza and Modan, alive if possible. To that end, armed with phasers and the four now working combadges, they had set off in opposite directions, each describing a circular search pattern that would eventually bring them back to the camp, hopefully with the shuttle’s location and with their two missing companions in tow.

  Troi was left to work with Ra-Havreii, and it was all uphill. He wouldn’t speak, or, if he did, it was only to ask for some tool or to correct her clumsy attempts to follow his repair instructions. Beyond that, the engineer had folded up inside himself and, she knew, was currently building a very solid door to lock himself behind.

  She understood it. His response, while somewhat unhealthy, was neither unnatural nor unexpected. He had helped to design Titan, after all, as he had all the Luna-class vessels.

  He’d already presided over the destruction of one such ship and now had suffered through a second. Troi would have been surprised, considering his mental state even before their current troubles, if he wasn’t somewhat withdrawn now. The problem was, if they were to survive, he would need to process this and get through it sooner rather than later. Much sooner.

  She could feel his emotions boiling inside him like an infinite sea of lava beneath his apparent calm. It was too much energy to bottle, and if he couldn’t let some out now, the eventual blow would be as catastrophic to him as what had happened to the Luna.

  “Xin,” she began again. “This was not your fault. You know that.”

  “Yes, of course, Counselor,” he said eventually and obviously lying. “This was just an unfortunate result of dangerous explorations.”

  “Yes, Xin,” she said. “We don’t even know that Titanwas destroyed.”

  “Commander Vale seems fairly certain,” he said.

  “Chris is under a lot of pressure,” said Troi. “It helps her to think the worst has already happened.”

  “A prudent response,” he said, reaching for the isolinear filaments.

  “Not really,” she said. “Only a natural one. Pessimism is a waste of intellect.”

  He worked away in silence, apparently puzzled at the tricorder’s stubborn resistance to his ministrations. None of the energy-manipulating devices had worked properly at first. Something about the transport or the nature of this planet had scrambled them. Watching him work on the thing, methodically resetting commands or repairing damaged filaments, gave Troi a deeper understanding of how his mind worked.