by David Mack
Thumper the sparking hologram slipped out of view, past a shallow curve ahead of them. When Burnham and Spock rounded the curve they found their holographic guide had vanished once more, having led them to an open portalway curtained with falling mist. The vapors were tenuous and short-lived, making it possible to see a wide-open compartment on the other side of the entry’s threshold. Though the oval corridor in which Burnham and Spock stood glowed a sinister crimson, the chamber ahead shone with hues of iridium blue and imperial violet. The pair slowed their pace as they neared the mist.
“Another test,” Burnham said, finding it difficult to mask her waning patience. “I’m growing tired of being treated like an animal conditioned to perform tricks for its supper.”
Spock remained sanguine. “Curious. I find the challenges . . . stimulating.”
His blasé attitude toward the Juggernaut’s deathtraps stoked Burnham’s irritation. “A well-played game of three-level chess is stimulating. This thing is trying to kill us.”
“Were that its goal, I should think its methods would be more direct.”
“Fine,” Burnham conceded, “it’s testing us. But if we fail the tests, we’ll die.” They halted half a meter shy of the mistfall. “Perhaps I’m being overly cautious, but the novelty of this vapor curtain makes me suspicious.” She lifted her tricorder and scanned the mist. “Water vapor and traces of unknown compounds. Running a toxicity simulation—” Two short, high-pitched beeps from her tricorder signaled danger. She turned the device to show its results to Spock. “Just as I thought. Those trace compounds will be absorbed through our skin on contact. Once they reach our bloodstreams, we’ll suffer acute anoxia and be dead in under ninety seconds.”
“A most efficacious poison.” Spock hefted his own tri-corder and began entering new data. “Assuming you and I are both carrying standard emergency first-aid kits . . . we do not possess the necessary ingredients to formulate an antitoxin to the mist.” He wrinkled his brow at something on his tricorder’s display. “However, there is another open portalway opposite this one, approximately forty-two point seven meters from our position. And according to this scan, the mist falling in that portalway contains the antitoxin to the one in front of us.”
Burnham peered through the falling mist and glimpsed the other open portal, far across the wide-open chamber. “So all we’d have to do is reach the other portal before the toxin’s effects become irreversible.” She considered the variables. “Forty-three meters? We should be able to sprint that distance in under ten seconds.”
“But assuming we will be physically and perhaps perceptually compromised—”
“Even if we quadruple our time to allow for the debilitating effects of the toxin, we could reach the antitoxin in under forty-five seconds. If we make an effort to hyper-oxygenate our blood before stepping through the mist, we should be able to make it.”
Spock regarded the vast blue-and-purple chamber with a dubious expression. “If the Juggernaut’s past challenges can be trusted to serve as indicators of those to come, I suspect this will prove more complicated than just holding our breath and running in a straight line.”
Burnham knew he was right, but refused to acknowledge his observation. “I’m setting my tricorder for a ninety-second countdown, with alerts at thirty and sixty seconds.” Once the device was prepped, she poised her index finger above the start button on the touchscreen. “Ready?”
“May I make a suggestion?”
“Of course.”
“After we pass through the mist,” Spock said, “I suggest we pause to assess the room.”
“Sensible, but remember the clock is ticking.” She tensed for departure. “Set.” As soon as she noted Spock hunched forward, she gave the order: “Go!”
Together they sprang through the wall of mist and stumbled to a halt on the other side. As their boots touched the deck inside the cavernous space, brilliant geometric patterns blazed into view beneath their feet. Whorls and long Fibonacci-style spirals were linked by angular lines that crossed one another to make irregular shapes—some with as few as three sides, others with as many as seven, and numerous variations in between. Different lines pulsed with varied hues ranging from white to yellow to neon green.
Burnham frowned. “Want to bet it’s a riddle showing us the only safe way across?”
“I would prefer not to wager on such—” Spock doubled over, his retort superseded by acute pain. He clutched at his abdomen and winced as he fell to his knees like a penitent.
She reached out to comfort him as a prelude to helping him up. “Spock! Are you—”
Agony bloomed inside of her, a black flower of nausea and knifing pangs. Her legs betrayed her, and then she was brought to her knees, humbled beside Spock. Through gritted teeth she forced the words, “No time!”
Soft pings from her tricorder counted off the seconds they were losing to their sudden infirmities. Relief from their shared suffering was just a few seconds away—but for all Burnham knew, the wrong step might prove just as fatal as a delay born of indecision.
She reached out with one hand to steady herself. As it pressed on a trapezoidal shape defined by surrounding white lines, an excruciating jolt of electricity stretched from deck to ceiling, sending fiery pain through her hand, which she yanked back to her side.
Huddled inside a circle that now seemed to be the only safe space in the room, she turned a look of contrition at Spock. “You were right. Good thing we didn’t make a break for it.”
“Indeed.” Spock forced himself to stand. “But unless we find a way to move forward in the next thirty seconds, we are both about to die in this room.”
18
* * *
“Focus your mind,” Spock said. “Pain is an illusion. Acknowledge it, then put it aside.”
Burnham turned her thoughts back to her childhood, her formative years spent on Vulcan. She imagined herself back in the concave pods of the Vulcan Learning Center in ShiKahr, her proctors stalking the pathways between the students. As Spock repeated the exhortation to move past pain, she heard the voices of her first instructors echoing in her memory.
The lesson was simple. Putting it into practice was not. Stabbing pains flared in her gut and chest, and with each gasp of pain she let slip, she felt her blood losing precious oxygen.
Spock’s calm baritone soothed Burnham’s rising panic. “Master your pain.”
“I’m trying,” she snarled through her clenched jaw. With effort she pulled in a greedy breath, only to feel her lungs burn in response. The core of her being felt as if it were being devoured by fire. No time for this, she told herself. Get up, before it’s too late.
Her body refused to obey. Then she remembered the mantra that so long ago had enabled her to master the Vulcan technique of pain suppression. It was a single line from the poem “Self-Pity” by D. H. Lawrence: I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself.
With the words came strength. Be a wild thing. Get up and fight!
The pain was still there, but now so was Burnham’s hard-won mental discipline, and she honed the edge of her will until it cut through the pain. Trembling but resolute, she stood and faced Spock. “I’m ready. How do we proceed?”
He tested an adjacent shape on the deck with the toe of his boot. Another flash of electricity compelled him to pull his foot back. “Very carefully,” he said.
The tricorder on Burnham’s hip beeped softly as it counted down the seconds until the poison in their blood asphyxiated them. “We have to move, but to where? What defines a safe step? The shape of a space? The number of sides?”
Spock looked down. “We are both standing in circles,” he noted. “There are no other circles on the deck. If a circle represents ‘one,’ then perhaps two—”
“Would be a teardrop,” Burnham cut in, anticipating his idea. “Something two sided.” She searched the spread of the deck within stepping distance. “I don’t see any.”
“Nor do I. Which seems to rule out defining a si
mple path.” Spock grimaced, but he fought to regain his composure, then exhaled slowly. “I am all right,” he assured her. He studied the deck with his intense stare. “What was the first thing you observed about this vessel?”
“Symmetry,” Burnham said. With that in mind, she surveyed the room again, starting from the point opposite their own, in front of the far portalway that held the antitoxin mist. “Two circles,” she said as she saw the shapes on the deck. Then she saw that the room’s chaotic design masked a hidden order. “It’s a mirror image! On both the x and y axes.”
“Perhaps there is no single correct path,” Spock said. “So long as we mirror each other’s movements across the deck.”
“Only one way to find out.” Burnham lifted her foot. “On the count of three, put your right foot into the irregular pentagon on your right, and I’ll put my left foot into the one on my left. One. Two. Three!” She and Spock each braved a single step out of their respective circles. In tandem they set their feet into the assigned shapes—and no jolt punished them. “So far, so good. I’ll call out shapes, you match my stride.”
“I will do my best,” Spock said.
Seconds bled away as they navigated their way across the room. Burnham struggled to find the least ambiguous shape for each next step, to avoid confusion regarding into which space she intended for Spock to advance. But each step magnified the pain snaking through her body. The toxin was a dark rider in her blood, delivering its message of agony from one extremity to the next, and threatening with each beat of her heart to break down her mental barriers.
They had almost reached the far circles when she heard a crackling bolt to her right. She halted and looked for Spock. He teetered inside his current space, smoke rising from his left foot. “A minor misstep,” he called out. Tremors in his voice betrayed his worsening condition as he added, “Call the next step.”
“On your left. Irregular hexagon bending toward the center. Left foot first. On two. One. Two!” She stepped forward with her right foot into her mirror-image of the space to which she had sent Spock. Her foot landed a fraction of a second ahead of his, and a searing fork of blue energy lashed out and skewered her from her left clavicle to her right knee. She stumbled as she entered the hexagon and started to drop to one knee.
No! If our movements don’t match—!
On the other side of the room, Spock looked back at Burnham as she lost her balance—and he matched her lurch and accidental genuflection with perfect synchronicity. They were close enough for him to ask in a normal speaking voice, “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” Burnham lied. “I’m going to put my left hand on the deck and use it to push myself back to standing.” She didn’t need to direct him to mirror her effort; he did it almost as if it had become instinct to them, as if they had been each other’s reflections all their lives.
Back on her feet, Burnham felt her head swim. She could barely breathe, and her vision softened. Only a few seconds until we’re toast, she realized. They needed to reach the far circles as quickly as possible, but the safest path was going to take too long.
Then logic demands I take the fastest path, not the safest one, Burnham decided.
“Three hops,” she said, barely able to make herself heard without breath. “Start on your left leg.” She needed to tell him the path, but she was afraid she would lose consciousness first. It took all her strength to draw one more fighting breath. “Five. Three. Six.”
“I understand,” Spock said, his own voice a gasp. “Ready.”
She tensed to spring and looked him in the eye. “Go.”
As one they leaped from their matching positions to the nearest pentagons, then to an isosceles triangle. The last step before the final circles was a symmetrical hexagon—
Burnham landed off-balance and had no time to recover. She either had to jump for the exit or splay herself across the floor. Faltering and exhausted, she threw herself at the circle.
She landed short. Spock landed beside her, his footing sure.
Gravity tugged Burnham backward. She windmilled her arms, fighting to force her center of balance forward, but it was of no use. Her left foot shifted backward—and the lightning slammed into her chest, ripping away the last of her breath in a hideous scream.
Then she was in Spock’s arms, both of them cocooned in lightning as he pulled her out of the circles and into the antidote mist. Only as they passed through the vaporous threshold did the lightning release them. Spock let go of Burnham, and they tumbled onto the deck. They both lay there for half a minute, letting the healing mist cascade over them.
The sickness and agony within Burnham faded quickly, and she was able to breathe again without pain. She sat up and checked on Spock, who was in the same sorry state she was. “Thank you,” Burnham said. “If you hadn’t pulled me back—”
“We likely both would have died,” Spock said. “After all, the test was built for two.”
“Well, thank you anyway.”
As the two of them stood, the vessel’s holographic orb reappeared in front of them, its surface bristling with intense energies, and the air pulsating from its acoustic emanations.
Burnham frowned at the lure. “Well, look at this. If it isn’t our own holographic Virgil, come to lead us down to the next circle of Hell.”
“I thought we had dubbed this entity Thumper,” Spock said.
Following the bobbing orb down the next stretch of oval corridor, Burnham replied, “That was when I thought it was our guide.”
“If it is not that, then what is it?”
“Unless we’re careful? A willing accomplice to our murders.”
* * *
A special brand of quiet tension reigned on the Shenzhou’s bridge. More than ten minutes had passed since Georgiou had retired to her ready room to continue her heated discussion with Captain Pike in private. She had set the ready room’s door to its privacy mode, and though the compartment was soundproofed, Saru imagined he could feel her anger through the reinforced bulkheads.
As the ranking officer on the bridge, he had chosen to busy himself at his usual station rather than sit idle in the command chair. His motives were, he knew, partly selfish. He had brought back such a wealth of tricorder data from his excursion into the caves that he was unable to resist digging into it, in the hope of unlocking more of Sirsa III’s ancient mysteries.
Even immersed in his work, however, he sensed the anxiety on the bridge. Everyone was keenly aware of the Enterprise looming outside the center viewport, its state-of-the-art shields and weapons likely more than a match for the decades-old technology of the Shenzhou. If Georgiou and Pike failed to reach an accommodation soon—
“Something bad is happening in there,” Oliveira said, looking back from her post at the ops station toward the ready room. “This isn’t going to end well.”
Ensign Detmer, well known for being jumpy under stress, tried to conceal her worry. She snuck a look aft, then asked Oliveira, “What makes you say that?”
Oliveira frowned. “Let’s just say I’m getting a bad vibe off this whole situation.”
Her pronouncement worsened the already failing morale on the bridge, because her hunches had a knack for proving to be correct. In the face of that, what could Saru say that wouldn’t come off as trite?
“Let’s have faith in the captain to sort this out,” he said, hoping to stifle further grim speculations. “Until then, keep your minds on your duties and remain calm.”
His attempt at a pep talk garnered suspicious looks from around the bridge. A far cry from rousing leadership, he brooded, but at least they’ve ceased gossiping.
New analysis reports appeared on his console. Deep scans of the cave art had been processed by the ship’s computer using filters too intensive to run on a tricorder. Saru found himself confronted with a far greater number of etched illustrations than he had dared to think might be down there, and the newly revealed segments were rich with details—especially the ones that surrounded
the drawing of the Juggernaut.
Lieutenant Troke, the Shenzhou’s deputy chief of the sciences division under Saru, got up from his console and climbed the steps from his sunken duty station to stand beside Saru’s post. Rows of circular metal cybernetic enhancements set into the Tulian’s teal-blue face reflected light from Saru’s console. “Sir, I’ve been monitoring your analysis of the cave art. I think you’ve made a remarkable find.”
“That much is obvious, Mister Troke.” Saru did his best to be nonchalant when faced with Troke’s augmentations. The Tulians, a cousin species to Bolians, had long ago embraced cybernetic technology with a zeal most Federation cultures had yet to emulate, and their casual fusion of organic tissue and high technology still made Saru uneasy at times.
He pointed a long, bony finger at the complex designs that surrounded the image of the Juggernaut. “What do you make of these elements?”
Troke squinted at the enhanced images, then fiddled absentmindedly with the neural coupling that protruded from his left occiptal lobe. “The beams emerging from the vessel appear to form an ordered pattern at their points of intersection, and again at their points of terminus. Can we isolate those points for analysis, sir?”
“Just a moment.” Saru keyed in the necessary commands. When only the points and their connecting lines remained, he was struck by an odd notion. “These look familiar somehow.”
“I agree,” Troke said. “Could it be a form of writing?”
“Doubtful,” Saru said. “All available evidence suggests the indigenous people relied upon a form of sequential art to express narrative. We found no evidence that they had developed a phonetic or symbolic written language.” He rotated the image and tinkered with manipulating the relationships between the points in three dimensions rather than limiting them to a flat plane. “Could it be a formula?”
Troke shook his head. “There doesn’t seem to be enough data for that.” His expression brightened. “Maybe it’s a molecular structure! Or a map of a single atom.”
