Текст книги "Well of Souls"

Автор книги: Ilsa J. Bick

Соавторы: Ilsa J. Bick
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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

If the shock waves that rippled through Garrett had been physical, she would have blown apart. As it was, no one said anything. The room was completely silent except for the faint beep-beep-beeping of the computer dutifully recording the proceedings. Halak’s color had gone from bronze to ashen, but he said nothing.

It was Garrett who reacted first. “Stop recording,” she said to the lieutenant. “Lieutenant Donald, you’re excused. You are to go to your quarters and stay there until I, or another officer, instruct you otherwise. Is that clear?”

Lieutenant Donald’s face was so chalky every freckle seemed splattered on with a paintbrush. “Yes, ma’am.” Without another word, he clicked off the recorder, rose, and hurried from the conference room.

Garrett waited until the door hissed shut. Then, slowly, she eyed Stern, Tyvan, and, lastly, Halak. She said nothing, and all of them, even Halak, met her gaze without flinching. She read the entreaty in Halak’s eyes. Then she stood and came around the conference room table until she was nose to nose with Burke. It gave Garrett a vicious thrill of satisfaction when Burke took a step back.

“Talk fast, Lieutenant,” Garrett said. “Make it good. No, make it better.”

“Captain, Halak’s lied, beenlying for years. SI’s been watching him for some time.”

“And you didn’t think to inform his commanding officers?”

“No.” She added, hastily, “When we discovered who he really was, we thought it best to use Commander Halak to our advantage.”

“We? Ouradvantage? Like we’re one big happy family? I don’t recall inviting you over for Christmas.”

“Captain,” Stern began.

Garrett cut her off with an angry gesture. “I don’t care who you work for, Burke. Starfleet Intelligence has no right, no right,to jeopardize any member of Starfleet, and you can be damned sure I’ll be on the horn to Starfleet Command about this, and if I find out that youare in any way culpable, I will personally see to it that you are roasted alive.”

Two high spots of color burned in Burke’s cheeks. “I understand your anger, Captain, and I apologize for my poor choice of words. But I’m only the messenger.”

That brought Garrett up short. Burke was right, she knew, but she was so angry it was miracle her head hadn’t erupted. Ease off, girl.“Apology accepted. Now,” she said, with a curt jerk of her head, “I don’t suppose you mind filling me in, Burke. Exactly who, or what is Halak?”

Burke’s expression was stolid. “Al-Halak is not his last name. El-Malkis. He’s not an orphan, except technically. His parents aredead now.But he had a mother and a father, as well as a brother, and they were all very much alive when Halak was born on Deneb V.”

Now it was Garrett’s turn to blink. “Deneb? Not Vendrak IV? But Deneb’s…”

“A known hotbed for illegal smugglers, traders of all descriptions. That’s right. That’s where Halak’s father ended up after beating an arms trafficking charge. Mahfouz Qadir was on Deneb at the same time Halak’s father showed up. They went into business together, one big happy crimefamily, Captain. And then they went to Farius Prime.”

“I find it hard to believe, with that history, that Halak would have been allowed into the Academy.”

Sivek spoke. “A masterful forgery, Captain. As I recall, this type of subterfuge isn’t exactly unknown. Wasn’t there an incident only two years ago where a young man tried to hide the fact that a great-aunt was Cardassian?”

“Yes, but that was discovered.”

“Only because the young man’s forgeries were poorly made. Think, Captain. It stands to reason that, logically, for every person Starfleet catches, there must be others who slip by simply because their forgeries are more expert.”

“Or they have powerful contacts,” said Burke. “In fairness to SI, Captain, we didn’t know about Halak until after the Ryn incident. There were enough questions about exactly what happened for Starfleet Intelligence to take a good hard look at the commander. After we concluded that his records were a forgery, we started inquiries. We discovered that the commander was and has been lying for a very long time. Sivek?”

Sivek ordered the computer to display another case file. The screen filled with a full frontal and profile shot of a man who looked to be in his mid-forties and who Garrett saw at once had to be Halak’s father. There was the same set of the jaw, the same jet-black eyes.

“Najm al Din el-Malk, deceased,” said Sivek. “Halak’s father changed the family name when they went to Deneb V. Prior to that, records indicate that he was arrested on trafficking charges but released for lack of evidence. Then el-Malk disappeared. Years later, a man named Nu’man al-Halak died when his ship fell into the Deneb sun. How he ended up so close to the sun is a mystery. Nu’man al-Halak was rated an excellent pilot.”

“If he burned up, there’s no body for DNA comparison,” said Garrett. “How do you know they’re the same man, or that Halak’s related?”

Sivek acknowledged Captain Garrett’s point with a nod of his sleek head. “We don’t have definitive proof. There is nothing on either el-Malk, or Nu’man al-Halak in Federation databases. Their records appear to have been erased.”

Garrett frowned. “No records at all? That’s almost inconceivable. You’re talking influence at the highest levels for that to happen.”

“That is one conclusion. Interestingly, at the same time that Nu’man al-Halak dies, another individual, much younger, shows up in our records.”

Sivek called up another file and Nu’man’s face dissolved into the face of a young man with the same cast of his jaw and fierce set to his eyes. “Baatin al-Halak.”

“Who is he?”

“Was. He was murdered in a gang-style killing. And he was your commander’s older brother.”

Despite the bombshell, Garrett’s expression was neutral. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Halak put a hand to his brow. “But, of course, you have no corroborating proof because his DNA isn’t on file, am I right?”

Sivek conceded the point with a nod of his head. “My hypothesis, however, is sound. Mahfouz Qadir, Nu’man al-Halak’s employer, had Baatin assassinated when Qadir learned that Baatin was dealing with the Orion Syndicate. Baatin must have been alerted. Before he died, he provided his younger brother—your first officer—with false documentation, provided by the Orion Syndicate. That way, no one would ever suspect Halak’s connection to Qadir, or Farius Prime.”

“And why would the Syndicate be so helpful?”

Burke picked up the thread. “Because the Syndicate knew that Halak would avenge his brother’s death, and the Syndicate, as the Qatala’s fiercest rivals, was only too happy to oblige. I know that Commander Batanides filled you in on our latest intelligence regarding the Orion Syndicate. Now, what I’m going to show you next, Captain, occurred when Commander Halak and Lieutenant Batra were on Farius Prime.”

Burke called up a computer record, and in another instant, an image blurred then cohered on the viewscreen. The scene had clearly been recorded at night; wedges of light fanned doorways to structures that looked to Garrett like warehouses.

She heard Halak straighten in his chair. Sparing him a quick glance, she saw that his eyes were wide, and an expression of dumbfounded amazement played over his features.

She turned back to Burke. “Where is this?”

“Tajora Street, the warehouse district right off the Galldean Sea. Those structures are all Qatala-owned.”

“Did you take these?”

“No. I’ve never been to Farius Prime, Captain. We have our sources, of course. But everything we need to hang Commander Halak is in his records, and right here. Computer, magnify.”

The computer complied, and Garrett saw a quartet of figures clustered near the entrance to one of the warehouses. She frowned as she realized that one figure’s skin was blue—the Bolian, Matsaro.

“Computer, enhance,” said Burke.

The figures wavered into focus. The image was grainy, and there were many shadows cutting across, but the figures were unmistakable. Halak. Batra. A woman, about Batra’s age, dressed in a hooded black cloak. And the Bolian.

“Who’s the woman?” asked Stern.

“Her name is Arava. She’s a highly placed member of the Asfar Qatala. Only she’s double-dealing. She’s really an Orion Syndicate operative.” Burke tapped the viewscreen with a finger. “And that’s yourfirst officer, Captain. Make no mistake. We have every reason to believe that Halak’s plan has been to hide in plain sight, knowing that, eventually, he would come into a position of trust and authority. What’s more, he’d have free run of Federation worlds. Armed with this advantage, he went back to Farius Prime: not to help anyone, or visit an old woman who doesn’t exist. No, he went back to make contact with Baatin’s people—Orion Syndicate operatives like Arava—planted throughout Qadir’s organization. Undoubtedly, part of his plan was to map out shipments of red ice, most likely to underprotected Federation outposts, just as he tried, and failed to do in Ryn space. But his aim is to take over the business, taking down Qadir and helping the Orion Syndicate. This is a personal vendetta, Captain, and I’m sorry to say that Starfleet’s been his cover.”

Burke turned from Garrett to Halak. They locked eyes. “And as for visiting a woman,” Burke said, “the only woman Halak came to see was Arava because, you see, Arava was—and is—Halak’s lover.”

Suddenly, Garrett felt her knees buckle. Groping, she found the nearest chair, dropped. She was acutely aware of every sensation at that moment: the tiny pops and crackles of her knees; the friction of her clothing around her wrists, her throat; the way her mouth was drier than sand.

In the silence, Garrett heard Stern’s murmured, “Oh, Lord.” If Tyvan had any reaction, he kept it to himself.

Then someone said, “That’s crazy.” Halak. “That’s crazy,” he said again. His head was in his hands, and his voice was muffled, strangled and he sounded as if he were either on the verge of tears, or a nervous breakdown. His fingers clutched at his hair as if he wanted to yank it out by the roots. “Crazy, you’ve got it all wrong.”

Burke opened her mouth, but Garrett put up a hand. “What did they get wrong, Halak? Which part of the story?”

“So much of it, so much of it.”

“But not all of it?”

And then Halak looked up. His eyes were sunken and his face drawn and hollowed out, as if he’d aged a century in the last hour. “Captain,” he began, and stopped.

“Halak?”

But Halak was already shaking his head. “I’m sorry, Captain, please forgive me,” he said, finally. His black gaze locked on Garrett. “But I respectfully decline to respond as my answers may incriminate me.”

Chapter 21

For about the eightieth time, Jase Garrett wondered what the heck he was doing.

Resting, he leaned his weight into the mountain. He was sweating, and he wanted to wipe his face, but being in his suit made that impossible. He’d adjusted his temperature controls twice, but he was still fogging, and it was hard enough to see as it was. The surface was in near-total darkness, the feeble light of the brown star coloring the terrain various shades of gray, rust, and a queer, dull, washed-out bronze that verged on muddy yellow. He flicked his tongue over his upper lip and tasted salt. He squinted, speared the beam of his flash into the slope below. The light picked out slurries of bronze rock and sand-colored debris. Tricky going. He’d have preferred hiking with the light off to free up his hands. He scanned the star-studded sky. The planet’s larger moon was near the horizon and the smaller one was higher, but neither cast much light and the steely starlight wasn’t bright enough. One misstep, and he’d go tumbling. One thing he didn’t want was to get hurt here,now, kilometers from help, especially when no one knew where he was. The biosphere, where they’d been living for almost a week and a half, was nestled on the far side of the valley, in a wide cirque. If something happened, he’d lie here for hours before anyone showed. Ifanyone showed before his air ran out.

Smart.He peered back down the mountain. Really smart move, Jase.What had he been thinking? He should’ve been in his quarters, dutifully studying something.Astromechanics. Parallel plane differential calculus. Something. But nooo.He was out here, mucking around over red rocks on a dead planet, trying not to get himself killed.

And being tugged– pulled—somewhere. He felt it, in his mind. He knew going any further was nuts, totally crazy. But when he thought about turning back, a mosquito whine at the back of his brain started: a mental tug that had led him to stand on a rocky face above a dead lake on a blasted world.

And something really bad had happened here. Jase angled his light behind and back up the mountain. Maybe explosions, or a war, a really bad war.Here, the sides of the mountains had fallen away, like orange wax melting under a hot flame. The pass had disappeared and been replaced by a series of chutes that jagged down the mountain, almost as if water had scoured out the rock, leaving deep, wide furrows. The steep mountain chute he’d chosen was littered with rust-colored scree and rubble. There was loose rock and scree everywhere, and that made the going treacherous, like picking his way over a vertical sheet of glare ice.

He’d found a pass incised into the rock about a kilometer northwest of the biosphere. At first, the pass had looked like nothing more than a dried stream, and Jase would have trudged by. But then that mental clarion call tickled his brain and when he got right up to the earth and swept the ground with his flashlight, he saw the faint but unmistakable impressions of footprints worn into the rock. From the people who used to live here.Staring at the footprints, Jase had felt a cold finger of dread trail along the knobs of his spine. Ghosts.Jase had felt them from orbit and then felt them again, stronger, on the surface. There were ghosts here, ghosts that floated just out of sight, hovered behind the rocks. Lived beneath the ground.

He’d taken the path anyway.

Nerves, he told himself as he trudged along, the beam of his flashlight punching the semi-darkness. Just nerves. Heck, who wouldn’t be a little nervous: stuck on a dead planet, a zillion kilometers from anyone, and cooped up in a biosphere with a guy like Su Chen-Mai?

Jase’s eyes darted right and left, scouring the steep mountain terrain. Twice, he could’ve sworn he was being followed. Twice, he’d ducked into the shadows, nerves jangling. But there’d been no one. Just his imagination: nothing more.

He checked his air. Eight hours left. At the rate he was going, he probably had just enough air to make it a third of the way down before he had to turn around. Again, he considered going back. Again, he discarded the idea. Might as well keep going for as long as he could, see how far he got. Next time (what was he thinking, there was going to be anext time?),he’d bring spare air, maybe leave it somewhere so he could change out and get back without having to rush.

He sidestepped, careful to keep his weight angled into the mountain. His feet bit into the earth, and he knew they crunched rock, though he heard nothing but his own breathing because there was no atmosphere to carry the sound. He wished there was something else to focus on but himself: his breathing, the fact that he was sweating so much he felt oily. He was sore, and his thighs trembled with fatigue and a hot burn from muscles that hadn’t been used in quite this way for months and months. His knees creaked and screamed with pain from the long downhill trek. His nose itched, and this was guaranteed to drive him crazy. And (wasn’t this just his luck?)he had to pee. Really bad. Just the thought made his groin clutch.

But there wasn’t anything he could do about the sound, his aching muscles, the way his nose itched so much his eyes watered because he was in a stupid environmental suit, a couple four, five kilometers away from the biosphere, under a dead sky littered with the hard, sharp points of millions of stars. There wassomething he could do about having to pee. He just didn’t want to. Not in a suit. No matter how clean everyone (his mom, his dad, but especially his mom)said it was, no matter how well the suit grabbed all that stuff and recycled it, or did whatever.No way.

He hadn’t planned any of this. Oh, he knew that his predicament (the pain in his thighs, the itch in his nose, the need to pee really bad)was entirely his own doing. He couldn’t even claim that he was just a stupid kid because he wasn’t a totalkid, and even when he had been, he hadn’t ever been stupid.Like, he shouldn’t even have been in the suit. But either he waited until all the adults were gone then steal a suit and sneak out of the biosphere and not tell a soul (not even Pahl) and risk getting grounded for life; or go absolutely-stark-raving-bonkers-bathouse-crazy with boredom. Probably his dad wouldn’t ground him for life. Probably.

But he hatedenvironmental suits. Stewing in a tin can, breathing canned air:That’s the way his mom described it, only she likedit, go figure. Jase didn’t know what a tin can was;he had to look it up. After studying a pretty strange painting by a twentieth-century guy who made a fortune painting the same soup can in different colors, Jase figured out two things. Being cooped up in a tin can looked uncomfortable, but the painter had been brilliant.

A couple of years ago, Jase worried that hating environmental suits might keep him out of Starfleet Academy. (That was when he was just a little kid though. Now that he knew he wasn’t ever going to the Academy because he was going to be an artist or something, he probably wouldn’t need to stick a toe inside an environmental suit.) He knew that sometimes transporters broke down, or shuttles blew apart, and you needed to know how to use a suit. He’d visited his mom enough times while the Enterprisewas in dock to understand that all sorts of people worked outside, in suits, all the time. He used to stand at one of the dock’s observation bays, his face plastered to cool glass, and watch the structural engineers, tiny as ants, crawl over the gray hull of his mom’s ship. And the most inane thought: What happens if they have to pee?

Oh, no.At the thought, Jase felt a sharp twinge that bloomed into a full-blown ache in his groin. Again. Drat.Screwing up his nose, he hummed something tuneless, just to have something to do instead of thinking how much he had to pee but couldn’t. (Well, he could.There were buttons and dials and hook-ups, right?)

Of course, right. He wasn’t a total moron. Still, gross. Jase tried thinking about sand dunes and deserts and hot red suns. Except his groin complained and his mind wouldn’t cooperate and his thoughts kept darting back to glasses of water and full bathtubs and swimming pools and blue, blue oceans.

Walk, Jase.Jase crunched over rock. Just walk.As long as he didn’t jiggle too much, walking wasn’t too bad. But, boy, what a dumb idea, coming out alone. His mom would have a cow if she found out. He didn’t know how mothers, or people hadcows and, truthfully, it was kind of a dumb expression. Probably Pahl would know where the slang came from. The Naxeran knew all these old slang expressions from all over the galaxy, but mainly Earth. Things like have kittens,or stiff as Herbert,or he’s not operating on all thrusters. Have a cow.

Thinking about Pahl made him feel bad. Jase had snuck away without telling his friend anything. In fact, he’d avoided the Naxeran all day, since the breakfast they’d had with his own dad and Pahl’s uncle. (Su Chen-Mai never ate with them, and that was fine with Jase.) Pahl’s uncle and his father talked about their work but in ways that puzzled Jase, as if there was more behind every word they said. He knew that if he concentrated very hard, he’d figure it out. Once, he’d tried: chewing his food, emptying his mind. A meditation trick his dad taught him, something Jase had used in school when he was nervous about a test. Only lately, before they’d come to this place, Jase discovered that instead of his mind getting empty and blank, like a bank of endless white clouds stretched across the sky, he saw pictures. Fragments of pictures, really: colors, a sensation of movement. Nothing he could really describe. And he heard words, only garbled like the way the voices of his parents had been when he’d been small and they had argued.

So he’d tried it that morning at breakfast—to see if he could get at the words bubbling beneath the stream of his dad’s conversation. He’d caught something. A picture, very coherent, of a big room made of red stone and a blue sky (a blue sky in a stone room?)but then his dad had given him a strange look, as if he knew. Instantly, Jase had clamped down, focusing again on the tart taste of his Maltaran orange juice.

Through it all, Pahl had eaten and chattered about nothing in particular. Jase hadn’t told him about what he’d seen in his dad’s mind. (If that washis dad’s mind he touched. Jase wasn’t sure.) Pahl was okay, except there was something scary about him. Like there was a yawning black hole and that was Pahl and there was nothing in the hole: no light, and no escape either. (Like when the ship had slid into orbit around the planet, and Jase almost got sucked inside Pahl.)

Not just sucked inside. Jase trudged, swinging the flashlight in a listless, mechanical, to-and-fro arc. Pahl had reached out…and grabbedhis mind, dug in with thought-claws, and then Pahl had hung on, pulling him down into that horrible black nothing in the center of his soul, and Jase had been so scared, he thought he’d just managed to save himself…

Jase’s left foot came down on a fall of loose scree, and suddenly, Jase was slipping, sliding. His hands flew up; his flashlight spun away. Reeling, Jase lurched right, made a wild grab at a boulder. He missed.

Jase gave a ragged cry. His helmet banged against a boulder and sent him pitching sideways. He hit the ground, his left shoulder crashing into solid rock and Jase screamed. He flipped, cartwheeled head over heels, like an acrobat who’s mistimed his roll. His back slammed against the mountain, hard enough to knock the wind from his lungs, and then he was glissading, feet first, out-of-control, skittering down the rocky chute, hurtling down the mountain. Somehow, he rolled right, and then he saw a huge boulder rush at his face. No, not his faceplate, not his faceplate! Screaming, Jase threw his hands up to protect his face, arms crossed, palms out.

That probably saved his life—or, at the very least, his faceplate didn’t shatter. Jase felt a hard, bone-shattering jolt in his forearms and then a bolt of pain that rattled his helmet and shivered through his limbs. He felt his body jerk and then fold at his waist, and he came to a sudden stop.

For a moment, he couldn’t do anything except focus on breathing. He gulped air. He felt queasy, sick to his stomach. He closed his eyes, working hard not to vomit. Shaken, he clung to the rock, waiting for the dizziness to pass. As he did so, he realized he didn’t have to worry about not peeing in his suit—not anymore.

Slowly, Jase pried open his eyes. He lay in an awkward twisted heap, his head down, his waist corkscrewed so that his left hip was pointing up and his right dug into the ground, his body literally folded around a hump of black rock. Maybe a meteor: The surface of the rock was scored with tiny pits. Lucky he hadn’t broken his neck. He felt the throb of his blood galloping in his temples, and his brain felt bruised. He was afraid to move. His shoulder hurt; his left hip hurt; his right leg was killing him. Maybe he’d broken something.

He planted his palms against the large boulder and pushed. The movement sent a lightning flash of pain sizzling down his spine. He grimaced, moaned, but kept the pressure up until his body rolled and he lay flat on his back.

It was then that he saw it: to his left. A flash of white. Something moving.

Jase froze. Every muscle went rigid with fear. Sliding his eyes left, he made out rivulets of small rocks pattering soundlessly along the ground to pool along his left side, like water backing up on the opposite side of a dam.

Someone was coming. Some thing.Ghosts, ghosts, those white ghosts! The hairs along the back of his neck stiffened with alarm. Cold sweat glazed his face, his chest, the undersides of his arms. Have to get away, have to!But he couldn’t move.

Slowly, not wanting to look but knowing he had to, Jase turned his head and looked back up the mountain. He almost cried aloud in relief.

A suited figure was picking its way down the slope.

Environmental suit—Jase watched as the figure bobbed around the rocks– that’s an environmental suit.

In another moment, Pahl dropped to his knees by Jase’s side. Jase saw Pahl’s lips moving beneath his frills, but Jase couldn’t hear a thing. His comm unit—Jase reached his right hand up and fumbled at his suit for the control—he hadn’t activated his comm unit.

He caught Pahl in mid-sentence. “…you hurt?”

“I’m okay,” said Jase, not really knowing if this were true but just so grateful not to be alone, he would have said anything. His shoulder still throbbed, and the back of his head hurt. “That is, I think I’m okay. I don’t know. I slipped.”

Then he had an awful thought. “What about my suit? Can you see my suit?”

“It looks okay. All your indicators are green. Can you sit up?”

Jase started to nod but stopped as a wave of vertigo left him nauseated. “A little dizzy,” Jase said, swallowing back something that tasted sour. He made a face, closed his eyes, and waited for the blackness before his eyes to stop spinning. “I hit my head.”

“Did you black out?”

“No. That is, I don’t think so.” What he didn’t tell Pahl was that he was feeling a little heavy and stupid, the way he did right before he went to sleep. Somehow he knew that was a bad thing because that meant that maybe he had a concussion.

Forcing his eyes open, Jase saw that Pahl’s face was creased with concern. “I’ll be okay.”

Pahl looked doubtful. “You don’t look very good.”

“I’ll be okay,” Jase repeated, as if saying it again made it true. “Help me sit up.”

Hooking his right arm under Jase’s left, Pahl eased his friend upright. Jase winced as the muscles along his spine complained. Pahl steadied Jase as Jase slumped forward, waiting for something bad to happen. When he didn’t vomit or pass out, he gave Pahl a weak smile.

“So far so good,” he said. “Let’s see if I can stand.”

The first time he tried to push to his feet, Jase nearly fell. Pahl took most of his weight, and Jase clung to Pahl for support. After a few minutes, Jase felt steady enough to let go. He braced himself against the large boulder he’d collided with and watched as Pahl sidestepped down a short distance to retrieve Jase’s flashlight. Jase’s head still hurt, and he was reasonably sure he’d had a tremendous bruise on his right shoulder. But he didn’t think he’d broken anything, and he wasn’t feeling as sick.

“We should go back,” he said as Pahl trudged back up the hill, flashlight in hand. Jase had plenty of air but enough adventure for one day.

Pahl nodded then frowned. Pivoting on his heel, he looked down the mountain. Jase saw his friend’s gaze flitting across the rock field below. “What is it?”

“I don’t know. Something here, though. Like,” Pahl’s head cocked to one side, as if listening to something very faint, “old voices. You know? Like when there’s a big room and it echoes for a long time.” Pahl’s ice-blue eyes zeroed in on Jase. “You know what I’m talking about.”

For a brief instant, Jase had the impulse to lie, to deny the ghosts he sensed hovering in the shadows of this dead planet. Then he thought again about what had happened between them on the shuttle and, instead, he nodded. “I don’t really hear them all the time either. They come and go like waves.”

Jase wondered why his dad had never mentioned these voices. Then he had an odd thought. Maybe his dad couldn’t hear them. Yes, but then why could he?He was only half-Betazoid. He wasn’t a telepath.

“Can you hear what they’re saying? I don’t understand them.”

“No.” Pahl’s eyebrows crinkled to a point above the bridge of his nose, and his frills shivered with consternation. “It’s like being in a big room with a lot of people all talking at once. But it’s stronger here. Actually,” Pahl pointed to a mound of boulders forty meters down the mountain and to the right, “right there. I’m going to take a look. You want to come?”

All his common sense told him to stay put, to backtrack his way up the mountain and then down the ruined pass and back to the biosphere. Instead, Jase said, “Sure.”

They didn’t speak as they made their way down. Jase’s head felt mushy, and he had to work hard at the simple act of walking. But he felt that the thought-claws were stronger, too. Ten minutes later, they stood alongside the tumble of nonspecific brown and rust-colored boulders. Jase studied them then looked back up the mountain.

“Up there.” Jase pointed at a ragged fringe of overhanging rock. “Landslide.” Then he squinted. “Hey, you see that? Two meters up, to the left. That gap.”

“It’s a hole, like an opening. Cave, maybe.” Pahl glanced at Jase. “Let’s go.”

The boys clambered up the hill, Pahl leading the way. As soon as they were level with the gap, Jase immediately realized that what they’d seen was not a depression, or a hollow caused by rocks falling together, or a true cave. The opening was arched, like a passage in the side of the mountain. Jase edged closer. The opening couldn’t be natural.

As if reading his thoughts, Pahl ran his gloved fingers over the rock. “Machine cut. I feel ridges. You wouldn’t get that with a phaser.”

“But what’s weird is that the door is here.Usually, a door is something you see from the outside. I mean, if this part of the mountain hadn’t sheared away, how would you know it was here?”

“Maybe it was blocked off and you had to know what to look for. Or there might have been an outer door, only it got knocked away.”